Charleston Gazette (West Virginia), July 31,1938. (Courtesy FDR Library)
Buffalo News, January 4,1938. (Courtesy FDR Library)
“Dear Felix: I am glad you dug up those excerpts about T.R.,” Roosevelt wrote Frankfurter in mid-December 1937. “Tooth nearly well. It did not touch the bone but was deep in the gum. Taking very good care of myself. I shall be delighted to have Borgese’s book. I have heard much of him and I hope he will raise a dozen American-Italian children, all good citizens.”
It was one of FDR’s pithy little letters that revealed much and concealed much. The excerpts from press denunciations of Theodore Roosevelt just thirty years ago were especially heartening when Franklin Roosevelt faced still-rising hostility from conservatives. The attacks might have been made in the fall of’37.
“Those anxious and confiding Republican businessmen and editors who expected the President to utter a ‘reassuring’ word did not know their man,” wrote the New York Evening Post, in August 1907. “His way of calming a nervous patient is to give another shock ... radical... disturbing... disastrous.” At the same time, the New York World demanded, “Always more law, more law—when will the President’s clamor for legislation end? When will he give the legitimate business interests of the country a breathing spell?” TR’s policies “threaten to paralyze every line of legitimate business,” American Business Man complained a few months later.
FDR’s tooth note was no run-of-the-mill dental complaint. He had suffered in November 1937 a deep molar abscess that inflamed the right side of his face and spread fever and pain to his whole body. His illness, which caused weeks of both postponed work and vacation, was treated in the press as some kind of gastrointestinal upset—one of the few references to the president’s health by newspapers that continued to conceal the incapacity of his limbs, rarely raising any question about his health—except, in the rabid right-wing tracts, his mental health.
And his reference to Giuseppe Borgese, whom Frankfurter had portrayed as a “gift” from Mussolini, “one of those old-fashioned, capacious, versatile, continental fellows in the tradition of Goethe,” reflected the president’s concern for the antifascist intellectuals, artists, and scientists he was helping, in a guarded way, to escape from the dictator’s persecution.
It was a cheery note that masked FDR’s disappointments and anxieties. The final weeks of 1937 were some of the unhappiest of his life. Caught between his decidedly unneutral attitudes toward Nazism and his public neutrality, between his ad hoc interventionism and his professed non-interventionism, he felt helpless in the face of German and Italian aggressiveness in Europe. While the antifascist nations were weak and vacillating, the Axis was moving. In November, Japan had signed an anticommunist pact with Berlin and Rome, and there was nothing the president could do about it. And for every Borgese who could be rescued, thousands of Europeans lay at the mercy of fascist aggression and anti-Semitism.
The sting of his defeat in the fight over the Supreme Court still vexed him. And it was exacerbated by his appointment of Senator Hugo Black of Alabama to the vacancy Associate Justice Van Devanter had created. A powerful spokesman for southern populism, Black met all of FDR’s criteria: relatively young, a non-Easterner, a committed liberal who nonetheless would gain approval from a Senate that otherwise had turned refractory. Then disaster: The Pittsburgh Post Gazette revealed that Black in his early political career had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. A nine-day orgy of denunciation and recrimination followed as Black, who was vacationing and book-hunting in Europe, returned on a Cunarder to face the music. Mobbed by journalists on the boat, he bypassed the print press by taking to the radio—and an audience of tens of millions—to denounce his persecutors, to explain that he had joined and then left the Klan, and to stress that some of his best friends back home in Birmingham were Catholics and Jews. Through all this FDR never uttered a word, nor did he later.
A more serious carryover from the court fight were several bills that had been laid aside during the court melee: a major farm bill that would set up an “ever-normal granary” to store bumper crops in surplus years for later release in lean years, a fair labor standards act that would put a floor under wages and a ceiling over hours, a bill for reorganizing the executive branch, and a measure to establish planning machinery in the national government. The president had called Congress back into special session; Congress had debated the measures for weeks and had adjourned without passing any of them.
Roosevelt’s great solace during such periods was threefold—family, close associates, and train and sea trips—and on occasion he combined all three. He thoroughly enjoyed taking his sons on fishing excursions, sometimes on Vincent Astor’s yacht, the Nourmabal; he virtually took over the cruiser Houston as his personal vessel; and each year he scheduled spring and fall trips by railroad to Warm Springs. Eleanor, who did not relish ocean travel and would accompany him, if at all, no farther than the port of departure, could not understand Franklin’s affinity for the “Nourmahal Gang” of wealthy yachtsmen.
Nor did she enjoy the male camaraderie that highlighted many of FDR’s trips—the poker games, moderate drinking, loud laughing and joking and almost juvenile horseplay. There was much telling and retelling of hunting and fishing yarns. Missed shots and lost fish were noted, recollected, and derided. Roosevelt needed this kind of humor, needed it all the more because he could not hunt, or play tennis or golf, or fish except from a fixed position on a boat. Through camaraderie he could feel close to action that he could not share.
Sometimes he went beyond horseplay to jokes that had a sharp edge of cruelty. Earlier in the year, when he called in Joseph Kennedy to offer an appointment as the ambassador to the Court of Saint James, he stopped Kennedy as young Jimmy Roosevelt ushered him in.
“Joe,” said FDR, “would you mind standing back there by the fireplace so I can get a good look at you?”
The puzzled Kennedy complied.
“Joe,” the president went on, “would you mind taking down your pants?”
Incredulous, Kennedy did.
“Joe,” said FDR, after staring at his bare legs, “you are just about the most bowlegged man I have ever seen.” He would have to wear knee breeches and silk stockings and would be a laughingstock in the press. “You’re just not right for the job, Joe.” While the unflappable Kennedy smoothly replied that he would gain special permission to wear a cutaway and striped pants instead, and did so, the story, as told by James, lingered for years as a prime example of FDR’s insensitivity. Few noted, however, that this was a man essentially lacking legs embarrassing a man who had them, bowed or not.
Surprisingly, given five years of heavy pressure on the administration, the top leadership of the New Deal was remarkably stable. All FDR’s top cabinet appointees were still in their cabinet posts: Cummings as attorney general, Farley the postmaster general, Hull in State, Ickes in Interior, Perkins in Labor, Wallace in Agriculture, and Morgenthau in Treasury (having served almost from the start, after Woodin’s death). Missy LeHand and Grace Tully, Early and Mclntyre, served him in the Oval Office and oval study; Hopkins (aside from a long period of illness), and Cohen and Corcoran and Rosenman were still his close advisers; Frankfurter and a host of others were still his frequent correspondents. He puzzled, exasperated, mentored, chided, delighted, raised them up, and cast them down; but they stuck with him, and he with them.
He needed this fixity in his turbulent life; even more, he needed the fixity of his family. But his family was hardly a fixed entity. Louis Howe, who had become virtually a member of the family, was gone, though not the memories of his sardonic wit, his blunt advice to the president, his mentorship to Eleanor Roosevelt, and his penchant for staging elaborate family charades. Anna and the boys had been going through marriages and divorces. Anna, thirty-one years old in late 1937, was married to a newspaper editor and lived in Seattle. James Roosevelt, despite his mother’s doubts about the idea, had agreed to serve as one of the president’s assistants, and Franklin Jr. had married Ethel du Pont.
The president looked forward to the usual big family Christmas, but the family gathering would not be so big this year. Eleanor would be visiting Anna in Seattle; Elliott and his second wife would remain in Fort Worth, Texas; and FDR Jr. would leave with his wife during Christmas Day to join the du Ponts in Greenville, Delaware. This was the second year in a row that Eleanor had missed the White House Christmas festivities; the year before she had rushed to a Boston hospital where Franklin Jr. was ill. Now she was with Anna, who was recovering from an operation.
Still, on Christmas Day the president thoroughly enjoyed the early invasion of his bedroom by excited youngsters, watching the stockings opened in front of the fireplace, telephone calls to Eleanor and Elliott, and the traditional family dinner in the evening, with his mother sitting across from him. During the day he attended services at the Church of the Covenant. The sermon had hardly been soothing.
“It is Christmas Day in Spain,” declaimed the young Reverend Mr. Peter Marshall, “and machine guns rattle in the hills. It is Christmas Day in China—and shrapnel is falling in the rice fields.
“Peace on earth! Goodwill toward men! Say the words over and over and you will be shocked at the hypocrisy of a world celebrating in solemn manner something it has not taken to heart.” If the president looked unusually grave as he left the church on James’s arm, could he have been reflecting that once again he had heard a sermon with no solution?
Realist though he was, the president could hardly have foreseen that 1938 would be the worst year yet for the democracies—that between March and September, two European countries would be lost to Hitler. Even less could he have predicted that 1938 would be the worst year yet for the New Deal, both economically and politically, and that he would have to spend far more time dealing with domestic problems than even with foreign crises during this dire period.
Economic storm signals had been mounting during 1937, but not to the degree that led FDR to see them as more than the usual ups and downs of the stock market and other indices. Earlier in the year conditions looked good, even compared to the boom year of 1929. The heavy spending in election year 1936, including payment of the veterans’ bonus, had brought reemployment high enough so that the administration concluded it was now possible to slacken off on spending, even though around 10 percent of the workforce was still jobless and over four million families were still on relief.
But by the end of 1937, even this progress seemed threatened. There was a “Black Tuesday” on Wall Street in October reminiscent of Hoover days, a sharp fall in steel production, a surge in unemployment to a shocking height often million and still rising. Virtually all the other economic indices were alarming.
What to do? So pleased had FDR been by the 1936-37 “recovery” that he had felt he at last could redeem his repeated promises to balance the budget. And now his liberal advisers were saying that the drop in government spending to a trickle had drastically cut incomes and spending. But he was sticking to his budget-balancing philosophy. Even during the fall, as the crisis mounted, he was reassuring the ever-anxious Morgenthau that he was working on spending reductions.
Roosevelt kept his mask of self-assurance even while becoming more and more uncertain as to what course to take. In January 1938, he delivered his annual message: a substantive, thoughtful analysis of the underlying national problems in agriculture and business, a weighing of the pros and cons of different solutions, discussion of wages and taxes, an earnest restatement of the New Deal and of his unwavering belief in an activist government that has “a final responsibility for the well-being of its citizenship,” and—once again—a call for a balanced budget. He resubmitted his 1937 legislative program and vowed he would not “let the people down.” “Bert,” FDR said to Republican leader Bertrand H. Snell after his talk, “as they used to say on the East Side of New York, ‘that wasn’t esking them, that was telling them!’”
If FDR was uncertain about the means to his goals, he was never uncertain about the goals themselves. His Jackson Day speech, on January 8, sought to remind his listeners of the true “morals of democracy”—the rule of the majority versus a handful of autocrats who claim vested rights to power. He urged Americans to join him in the spirit of Jefferson and Jackson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt to curb the power and privileges of small minorities, especially those businessmen who “will fight to the last ditch” to retain their autocratic control over the economy.
The struggle to enact New Deal legislation, for FDR, was part and parcel of the class warfare that had been going on since the battles between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans. “In our Nation today,” he told the Jackson Day dinner crowd, “we have still the continuing menace of a comparatively small number of people who honestly believe in their superior right to influence and direct government, and who are unable to see or unwilling to admit that the practices by which they maintain their privileges are harmful to the body politic.” There was no doubt about FDR’s leadership role: “To serve the needs, and to make effective the will, of the overwhelming majority of our citizens and ... to curb only abuses of power and privilege by small minorities.”
But FDR discerned an odd twist. The cunning strategy of the plutocrats in their fight against the New Deal, he observed, was to convince the people that their true interest lay with the interests of big business, thereby blinding them to the reality of the class struggle. They were using, he declared, “an ancient strategy” whereby those would want to exploit or dominate a people “seek to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them.” Thus the plutocrats hoped to convince people that the government’s move against minority abuses was really an attack upon the exploited majority itself.
With these plutocrats there “is going to be a fight—a cheerful fight on my part”—but without “compromise with evil.”
...
It was a good show of bravado, but in reality FDR was puzzled. While still talking budget-balancing, he began to consult business leaders, economists, and others about a change of strategy. Slowly he found himself immersed in a mortifying repeat performance, exploring virtually the same four alternatives that had faced him in 1933: economy, government-business collaboration, trust-busting, spending. It was trial by error all over again—long after the earlier experimentation had been assumed to lead to solutions.
A fierce backroom war broke out among his advisers. Facing again the chaos of king-of-the-hill business competition and boom-and-bust industrial production, the president was sorely tempted to return to the NRA idea—not the act itself—of government sitting down with business around a table to estimate future demand and supply and stabilize the market. Even though the president claimed he was seeing more businessmen than any other group, this idea never got very far—in part because at this point industry and government did not trust each other that much.
Far more popular with key White House advisers was the opposite course, a return to “trust-busting.” Frustrated during the NRA days, advocates of Brandeisian economic decentralization were returning to the battle. They not only considered economic monopoly unfair and undemocratic, they also contended that inflexible prices and rigid structures had helped bring on the recession. FDR was responsive. In a message to Congress late in April 1938 he charged that blanket price increases, excessive price leadership, and other rigidities should be considered illegal. But, whatever the long-run desirability of fairer competition and freer markets, few could argue that future laws would have major impact on the still deep recession.
The question was, What could be done quickly? and another set of advisers had their answer: Spend, spend now, spend big. Harry Hopkins, recovered from “ulcers,” was at hand with a readily available list of fine WPA projects. Ickes, who had glumly accepted the diminishing of his beloved Public Works Administration, also had his grander projects. Of a far different cut was Marriner Eccles, a Utah banker who had increasingly impressed the administration with his broad grasp of the economy in his chairmanship of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
And there was still—and always—Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, day in and day out urging budget balancing with the certainty of the true believer. He had extensive support in Congress and in the business community. But opposing groups were active too. One hundred thousand people turned out for a relief demonstration in Detroit; three thousand youths mobilized in Washington to call for a “youth act” that would provide part-time jobs.
As the palace struggle over economic strategy was rising to its height, an unsolicited letter arrived for FDR from John Maynard Keynes. “You received me so kindly when I visited you some three years ago that I make bold to send you some bird’s-eye impressions,” Keynes began innocuously, and then proceeded to a blunt attack on the president’s recent economic policies. Recovery was possible only through large-scale public works and other spending. Keynes, who moved amid Britain’s business elite despite his views, warned the president away from secondary efforts, such as “chasing the utilities around the lot every other week.” He even tried to improve FDR’s understanding of those strange creatures, businessmen, who he said required different handling from politicians.
“They are, however, much milder than politicians, at the same time allured and terrified by the glare of publicity, easily persuaded to be ‘patriots,’ perplexed, bemused, indeed terrified, yet only too anxious to take a cheerful view, vain perhaps but very unsure of themselves, pathetically responsive to a kind word. You could do anything you liked with them, if you would treat (even the big ones), not as wolves and tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.”
Roosevelt did not write back to Keynes; perhaps he reflected that British businessmen must be rather tamer creatures than the ones he knew in America. He turned the letter over to—of all persons—Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau and signed the secretary’s routine response.
Once again it was not general theory but specific conditions to which FDR did respond. In March the stock market’s halting decline turned into a sudden sickening drop. Unemployment was still mounting. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace and others in the administration were urging him to provide again, in Wallace’s words, “that firm and confident leadership which made you such a joy to the nation in March of 1933.” Even some business leaders were guardedly calling for spending.
Late in March the president journeyed to Warm Springs; on the way back he stopped off in northern Georgia to make one of his most bitter assaults on minority selfishness, making another declaration of war against the plutocrats.
Disagreeing strongly with Keynes’s advice that it was a mistake to consider businessmen “more immoral than politicians,” FDR excoriated the wealthy—as had Cousin Ted. The stock market slump seemed only to fan his anger. “Today, national progress and national prosperity are being held back chiefly because of selfishness on the part of a few,” he declared. The nation could not permanently get on the road to recovery, he explained, if the methods of recovery were left to the discretion of those “who owned the Government of the United States from 1921 to 1933.” Those same plutocrats who oppose progress, he asserted, believe in their hearts “that the feudal system is still the best system,” and, he added, “there is little difference between the feudal system and the Fascist system. If you believe in the one, you lean to the other.” After watching people standing to wave at him on the trip north, he turned to an assistant. “They understand what we’re trying to do.”
His mind made up, he decided to move quickly and vigorously. He urged Congress to pass a $3-billion spending program as soon as possible, and the legislators moved to comply. But now he had Morgenthau to contend with. In company with Hopkins and son James, he held an evening meeting with the obviously unhappy secretary shortly after the return from Warm Springs.
“We have been traveling fast this last week and have covered a lot of ground,” the president challenged him, “and you will have to hurry to catch up.”
Morgenthau said he doubted that he ever could.
“Oh, yes, you can,” FDR said airily, “in a couple of hours.”
It was a hard two hours. At the end Morgenthau said, “What you have outlined not only frightens me but will frighten the country.” And, “How much is it going to cost?”
“Oh, we have all that...,” the president said, “we have all that.”
During the following days, Morgenthau told his staff that he was more frightened than he had been since 1933. He infuriated FDR by informing congressional leaders, against his boss’s wishes, that the new program would boost the 1939 deficit by at least $3.5 billion. He worked on Eccles and other administration advisers. And he threatened to resign.
“You just can’t do that,” FDR said. “You have done a magnificent job.” If Morgenthau quit, he said, the Democratic party would be destroyed, a third party would come about, and the administration program would fail in Congress.
Besides, FDR added, if he resigned, Morgenthau would go down in history as having quit under fire. Morgenthau stayed.
...
Presented by Roosevelt with his new spending program, Congress responded with—for Congress—alacrity. The legislators had already voted a fresh $1.5 billion for Reconstruction Finance Corporation loans; to this the legislators joined the president’s request for about $2 billion for direct spending, along with another $1 billion mainly for loans. Added to the administration’s desterilization of gold reserves held by the Treasury, over $6 billion was soon being injected into the economy. Put into effect quickly by Roosevelt’s eager spenders, the economy began to edge up again, though a large carryover of unemployment continued to drag recovery.
Congress also lived up to the old adage that lawmakers like nothing more than boosting spending and cutting taxes. In May, Republicans and southern Democrats took the lead in repealing the progressive normal tax and undistributed profits tax passed in 1936. The action distressed the president because it almost canceled the graduated tax on undistributed corporate surpluses and indeed repudiated the progressive tax principle by establishing a flat 15 percent on capital gains. But the president found some good items in the bill, especially its lightening of tax burdens on small business. In this dilemma he took a most un-Rooseveltian way out—for the first time in his presidency, as he announced to a West Virginia crowd, he would let a bill become law without his signature.
Congress also took the initiative on two measures less important in themselves than in their foreshadowing of the future. In May the Naval Expansion Act of 1938 authorized a $1 billion expansion of a “two-ocean navy” over the next decade, with increases for aircraft carriers, capital ships, and cruisers. And in the same month the House of Representatives established a committee to investigate “Un-American Activities,” which came to be known as the Dies Committee after its chairman, the conservative Texas Democrat Martin Dies. Its task was to conduct probes into Nazi, fascist, communist, and other organizations deemed “un-American.”
And there was a measure that both echoed political storms of the past and would precipitate more in the future. In 1906, at the height of Upton Sinclair’s and the muckrakers’ attacks on rotten meat in processing centers, Congress had responded to Theodore Roosevelt’s call for reform with the Pure Food Act. Over thirty years later, after the act had proved ineffective in myriad ways, Congress replaced it with the Food, Drugs and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Toward the end of the Hundred Days in 1933, Roosevelt had approved a tough food and drug bill that Tugwell had brought to him—supported it, Tugwell felt, largely because of TR’s 1906 leadership on the issue. But after that 1933 bill encountered a storm of opposition from advertisers and newspapers, as well as from drug and cosmetic makers, FDR’s support faded away, and Tugwell was left exposed in the heavy crossfire. Now, in the 1938 act, Congress was strengthening the reach of regulation through the Federal Trade Commission, but the act left many gaps in coverage and loopholes for lawyers, which set the stage for more sharp struggles in the decades ahead.
What had happened to the four measures left over from the 1937 session? Congress finally passed one of them in February—the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938. Incorporating the “ever-normal granary” notion that Wallace had struggled for over the years, the bill authorized the secretary of agriculture to fix marketing quotas when surpluses of export farm commodities—notably corn, wheat, cotton, rice, and tobacco—threatened price stability; authorized acreage allotments to each farmer after two-thirds of the growers voted to approve the marketing quota in a referendum; and authorized the Commodity Credit Corporation to make loans to farmers on their surplus produce slightly below parity. The president was pleased by both the democratic, or plebiscitary, aspects of the measure, and by the near certitude that a major farm bill would now survive Supreme Court scrutiny.
The early and easy passage of the farm bill contrasted sharply with the plight of wages and hours, another of FDR’s measures held over from 1937. Never had an FDR “must bill” received such a battering as the proposed Fair Labor Standards Act. Introduced in Congress in May 1937 by Senator Black and the co-sponsor, Congressman William P. Connery of Massachusetts, it met furious opposition at once, not only from southern legislators protecting their low-wage industries but also from organized labor, which feared that governmental protection would offer workers an easy alternative to union efforts. After more mangling in the Senate, the bill passed the upper chamber, only to become imprisoned in the House. A stalemate continued for months, as a conservative coalition stood firm in its demand for a north-south wage differential. Finally, in a tumultuous twelve-hour session, the House passed the bill by a decisive vote.
Now both chambers had passed the bill—but in two different versions. Southerners threatened filibuster, and labor warned it would oppose the bill if differentials were restored. Then, at last, a breakthrough; a conference committee skillfully negotiated a compromise.
When FDR signed the bill late in June 1938, exclaiming with a sigh of relief, “That’s that!” it must have been with a sigh of disappointment as well. The early economic impact of the bill, which set a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour, would be minimal. Still, the forty-four-hour-week maximum, with time and a half for overtime, would lead to more and longer weekends for workers. And tucked away in the bill was a provision it had taken a century for the nation to adopt—a ban on labor by children under sixteen.
At least the wages-and-hours bill finally went through, however tattered. But on another of the carryover bills from 1937, executive reorganization, the president suffered a humiliating defeat.
On the face of it, administrative reform would appear to be the most widely popular of all FDR’s proposals. For decades presidents, leaders of both parties, political scientists, and organization experts had been calling for an extensive overhauling of the executive branch. Businessmen wanted the government to be more “businesslike,” and Americans eagerly swallowed reforms that would appear to foster efficiency and economy. Denunciations of “bureaucracy” had swelled during the New Deal years along with the bureaucracy itself. As FDR’s agencies expanded, he too became more and more critical of the overlapping and lack of coordination. He wanted to put the chief executive’s administrative machinery “on the same kind of an efficient basis” as “an industrial plant or a private charity or even the financial end of a church.”
With such a consensus it was not surprising that FDR’s recommendations were received with considerable support, despite some quiet hostility in Congress and general apathy, when he presented them in January 1937. He proposed to strengthen executive authority and responsibility by putting independent agencies under the line departments; to create two more such departments, Social Welfare and Public Works; to expand the White House staff; to substitute a director of personnel for the existing three-member Civil Service Commission; and to extend the merit system “upward, outward, and downward to cover practically all non-policy-determining posts.”
Shunted aside during the court fight, these proposals marked time while the Supreme Court bill held the center of the stage. Not until late February 1938 did reorganization come before the Senate. The time was not auspicious. Memories of the outcries against “dictator Roosevelt” were ready to be reinvoked. Alarmed by the opposition’s strength in Congress, Roosevelt, along with his chief politicos Hopkins, Corcoran, Farley, and Ickes, pulled out all the political stops, as they traded White House favors and patronage plums for congressional support.
Even the most hardened administration operatives could not have anticipated the hurricane of opposition to the reorganization bill. A “National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government,” launched by the conservative publisher Frank Gannett and his chain of newspapers, sent out almost a million letters urging protests to Congress. Father Coughlin, rallying from his 1936 setback, fulminated against the bill. A columnist warned of possible Hitlerism. Scores of “Paul Reveres,” mounted on horses with banners reading NO ONE-MAN RULE, forayed up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol to save Congress from tyranny.
It was the Supreme Court fight all over again, but now with an almost hysterical edge. A proposal for minor executive reorganization had been converted into a lunge for dictatorship. FDR was so forced on the defensive that he took a course unusual for him—direct and quick repudiation of a charge at the height of battle, rather than using his own timing. Suddenly summoning reporters late at night at Warm Springs, he announced: “(a), I have no inclination to be a dictator; (b), I have none of the qualifications which would make me a successful dictator; (c), I have too much historical background and too much knowledge of existing dictatorships to make me desire any form of dictatorship for a democracy like the United States of America.”
Perhaps this disclaimer helped the Senate to pass the bill despite the defection of as loyal a senator as Robert Wagner in the face often thousand telegrams of protest and reservations of his own. But the crucial test lay ahead, the House. Remembering the charges against him of “stubbornness” during the court fight, the president was willing to make concessions. Under the original measure Congress would have had power to veto presidential reorganization only by a two-thirds vote in both chambers; now the president agreed that only a majority vote would be required, thus making it easier for White House proposals to be defeated. In vain. Responding to pressures from administration agencies like the Veterans Bureau, as well as potent interest groups, the House of Representatives recommitted the bill to the hostile Rules Committee by an eight-vote margin.
When the president tried to accept defeat gamely by writing thank-you notes to Speaker William B. Bankhead and Majority Leader Sam Rayburn, he ran into a small White House rebellion. FDR should not take his defeat lying down, Ickes protested.
“Mr. President,” Ickes said, according to his diary, “if I were you I would call a special meeting of my Cabinet. I would say to them: ‘God damn you, I am not going to be satisfied with lip service with respect to this bill. I want every one of you to get out and line up every vote you can’”. As for that letter to Rayburn, Ickes said, Corcoran and Missy LeHand were opposed to such a conciliatory response to Congress.
The president toned down the letter but still sent it. No retaliation—yet.
On the face of it, Roosevelt appeared to accept his setbacks of early 1938 with good humor. After a White House visit in mid-May, Frankfurter wrote that he marveled at “the sense of serenity that everything about you conveyed.” The Harvard law professor, who invariably flattered FDR, continued, with a kernel of truth, “With some knowledge of American history, I had the feeling that not since Lincoln has the White House had an occupant with such imperturbability of soul.” Like Lincoln, he said, the president combined democratic faith, antiseptic humor, and largeness of view.
FDR seemed to be his usual cheery self in his repartee with the reporters, his self-assured and even cocky speeches, and his warm letters to personal friends. He resumed good relationships with some old allies—notably New York governor Herbert Lehman—who had deserted him in the fight over the Supreme Court. He was off on a cruise in July, he wrote William Allen White, “and I know the old health is holding up because I have not bitten off the heads of the office staff for months.”
Behind this mask of breezy self-confidence, Roosevelt was a deeply frustrated and perplexed president.
Frustrated, because of the behavior of Congress. Of the “Big Four” carryover bills from 1937, the lawmakers had passed only one intact: the farm bill. The wages-and-hours bill had been terribly compromised, and Congress had virtually ignored his “must bill” for governmental planning machinery. But for FDR the most stunning disappointment of all was the defeat of the executive reorganization bill. It was a sharper challenge to his presidency than the court bill defeat; in that case, after all, he was intruding into the judiciary’s domain, while on administrative reform the Congress was invading his turf.
It was a familiar story: FDR remembered visiting Theodore Roosevelt in the White House in 1905, TR stamping up and down in front of the fireplace in the oval room upstairs, muttering, “Sometimes I wish I could be President and Congress too.”
How to deal with such deadlock? For a time the president’s perplexity seemed greater than even his frustration. He was an old pro—he had served as state legislator, Washington politico, and governor; he knew all about the checks and balances, the game of politics, the pressures of interests, the give-and-take of executive-legislative relationships, the need for compromise in a democracy. Yet it was hard to comprehend how the huge Democratic and progressive majorities of 1932, 1934, and 1936 could have eroded so rapidly, especially on bills like wages and hours that came straight out of the progressive heritage represented by both Roosevelts.
FDR was so skilled in cloaking his deeper emotions that we will never know how in the spring of 1938 he was dealing, emotionally and intellectually, with his “dilemma of deadlock.” We do know he tended to think not in terms of institutions, classes, and ideologies but of individuals, specific friends and foes, concrete situations.
This trait may throw light on the most daring, dangerous, and extreme political decision Roosevelt made during his entire political career—to try to purge the Democratic party of key congressional conservatives who had fought his programs.
Even his way of loosing this thunderbolt betrayed some mixed feelings and calculations on his part. In a long fireside chat late in June, he began by listing much that the 75th Congress had accomplished—not only two of the four carryover measures but bills to establish a new Civil Aeronautics Authority to supervise commercial aviation and air mail, to set up the United States Housing Authority for funding large-scale slum clearance and low-rent housing, and to authorize stepped-up spending programs for the Works Progress Administration, Public Works Administration, Rural Electrification Administration, Civil Conservation Corps, and other agencies. The president slyly noted that the Supreme Court had now shown willingness to cooperate with the two other branches “to make democracy work.”
He then turned to himself. After the 1936 election, he said, he was told “by an increasing number of politically—and worldly—wise people that I should coast along, enjoy an easy Presidency for four years, and not take the Democratic program too seriously. They told me that people were getting weary of reform through political efforts and would no longer oppose that small minority which, despite its own disastrous leadership in 1929, is always eager to resume its control over the Government of the United States.
“Never in our lifetime has such a concerted campaign of defeatism been thrown at the heads of the President and Senators and Congressmen” as in the past year and a half. “Never before have we had so many Copperheads,” he said, the people who in an earlier crisis had tried to make Lincoln give up his fight against slavery.
Having waxed congratulatory and militant, Roosevelt then became defensive as he discussed the economy. The fault, he said, lay with capital and labor, and with government too—but the last mainly for believing that industry and labor would make no mistakes and for delaying the passage of the farm and wage-and-hour bills. Once again the president denounced the businessmen who kept crying for restoration of “confidence” while showing indifference to the suffering of the people and thwarting all the efforts of the New Deal. More progress had to be made, and he would need help. The 1938 election would be a test of liberalism versus conservatism, and Democrats needed to distinguish between the two sides.
“As President of the United States, I am not asking the voters of the country to vote for Democrats next November as opposed to Republicans or members of any other party. Nor am I, as President, taking part in Democratic primaries.
“As the head of the Democratic party, however, charged with the responsibility of carrying out the definitely liberal declaration of principles set forth in the 1936 Democratic platform, I feel that I have every right to speak in those few instances where there may be a clear issue between candidates for a Democratic nomination involving these principles, or involving a clear misuse of my own name.
“Do not misunderstand me. I certainly would not indicate a preference in a State primary merely because a candidate, otherwise liberal in outlook, had conscientiously differed with me on any single issue. I should be far more concerned about the general attitude of a candidate toward present-day problems and his own inward desire to get practical needs attended to in a practical way.” FDR complained of “reactionaries” who said yes to progressive goals but blocked specific action—this type he labeled as a “yes, but” fellow.
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In this electrifying talk, which unleashed avalanches of praise and denunciation, the president made a double promise not to take part, as president, in either the primary or general elections of 1938. On the faulty premise that he could separate a part of himself out as party leader, he proceeded to violate the second promise and later the first.
Two weeks after his “purge” talk, the president was off in his air-conditioned railroad car for a long excursion to the West Coast, then a long sea voyage on his beloved Houston, thereafter to disembark in Florida for a final journey up the East Coast.
The railroad trip was mainly a delight, as FDR mixed patriotic and commemorative talks with praise carefully meted out to candidates on the basis of their cooperation with the New Deal. In Marietta, Ohio, he celebrated the sesquicentennial of the establishment of the “first civil government west of the original thirteen states,” under the epochal Northwest Ordinance. In passing he made a glancing reference to Ohio senator Robert Bulkley, giving him as much support as Bulkley had to the New Deal, and only that much out of fear that an even less pro-New Deal candidate would win the primary.
The next stop, in Covington, Kentucky, brought a bit of comic opera. If there was any man Roosevelt wanted to protect rather than purge, it was Alben Barkley, a stalwart Senate leader and New Deal loyalist. Not only would a victory for Barkley prove New Deal support in this border state, but his defeat would mean the elevation of Senator Pat Harrison to Senate leadership—an outcome FDR so feared that he was in cahoots with John L. Lewis to help Barkley. The senator, however, was being challenged in the primary by Democratic governor Albert B. “Happy” Chandler, who had a big grin, a rousing platform style, a firm grip on his political organization, and dubious liberal and ethical credentials. While dignified Alben looked on, Happy seized his big chance by greeting FDR’s train and adroitly sliding into the president’s car and Barkley’s intended place next to him. The governor took more than his share of the bows, while Barkley smoldered and FDR exhibited his usual sangfroid.
But Happy soon got his comeuppance when Roosevelt launched into a glowing endorsement of Barkley’s long experience, national leadership, and legislative ability—a “son of Kentucky of whom the whole Nation is proud.” He paid Chandler the dubious tribute that he “never came to Washington and went away empty-handed,” but the young governor was not to be compared with the seasoned statesman. Claiming later that FDR at least hadn’t “knocked him out,” the irrepressible Happy tried at least to keep his thumb hooked into the president’s coattails, but in a later talk FDR shook even that digit loose by hinting that Chandler had approached the White House with a deal in judicial appointments.
FDR’s railway caravan zigzagged on and on across Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and Nevada, to California. The president made over thirty speeches—a measure of his determination to liberalize the Democratic party as well as touch his own political bases. While he discussed many matters besides primary issues and candidates, he continued his judicious allotment of credits and discredits. In Oklahoma he praised Senator Elmer Thomas for his help on public works, without mentioning Thomas’s mixed liberal record or repudiating Thomas’s opposition in the primary. In Texas he smiled on Maury Maverick, who had aroused Garner’s opposition for acting like a maverick, and he smiled too on twenty-nine-year-old Lyndon B. Johnson, who had won a special House election the year before. But he sent Senator Tom Connally, a court bill foe, into an icy rage by virtually ignoring him and—even worse—announcing his choice for federal judge of a man Connally had not favored.
It was becoming evident that, despite Roosevelt’s claim that he would not make any single vote the litmus test, opposition to the court bill was a crucial strike against his support. In Colorado, Senator Alva Adams, another opponent of the bill, shifted uneasily from foot to foot while FDR ostentatiously ignored him. In Nevada the president snubbed Senator Pat McCarran, a stout New Deal foe, though the ever resourceful Pat managed to insert himself into the White House limelight by cheerleading the “Hurrah for Roosevelt” at every stop. In California he was reserved toward Senator William Gibbs McAdoo, merely referring to him as “my old friend,” without any encomium, even though McAdoo was a longtime on-again-off-again political ally, and even though McAdoo’s primary opponent was Sheridan Downey, a feared “radical” who had inherited the mantles of Dr. Townsend and Upton Sinclair by heading up a potent “$30 Every Thursday” movement.
Good news came to the president on the Houston even while he was cruising down the West Coast to the Panama Canal and north to Pensacola. Barkley won handsomely in Kentucky, as did Thomas in Oklahoma. While Adams too won in Colorado, and McCarran appeared certain to carry Nevada, Roosevelt had not been so involved in their races or cool to them for these to be marked as setbacks. It was the Barkley victory, with its implications for future New Deal leadership in the Senate, that won the crucial press attention.
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As cheery as ever, deeply sun-tanned, evidently well rested, the president was the picture of self-confidence in Pensacola as he was piped off the Houston early in August 1938. Yet the most daunting phase of his “journey for liberalism” clearly lay ahead. For one thing, he was entering an area far different from the Midwest and West. Only a month earlier he had stated his “conviction that the South presents right now the nation’s number-one economic problem—the nation’s problem, not merely the South’s.” He listed the problems: wasted or neglected resources, soil abuse, absentee ownership of resources, farm tenancy, low farm income, and hence the heightened need for education, housing, health, and the protection of women and children. As a self-styled Georgia farmer he had in fact seen many of these conditions firsthand.
Too, he was entering a region whose liberalism was often as barren as its grown-over land. With some dramatic exceptions, the most intense opposition to the New Deal had been hoisted by southern businessmen, publishers, and members of Congress. The president was not about to ignore reactionary southern politicians, or snub them, or damn them with faint praise. He had come to help drive them out of office. This was the “purge.” And no one symbolized and empowered southern reaction, in FDR’s mind, more destructively than Senator Walter F. George, a mild, sixtyish, buttoned-up politico, whose longevity in the Senate had brought him the chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee. Before a crowd of fifty thousand in Barnesville, Georgia, with Senator George sitting behind him, FDR told about his own coming to Warm Springs fourteen years earlier, how he found hospitality and health “in a pool of warm water,” but how he had also found “one discordant note”—exorbitantly high electricity rates, four times the price of electricity in Hyde Park. This led him to the role of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), the South as the number-one problem, and the need for southern leadership for definite action in Congress.
If the people of Georgia wanted such action, he said, they must elect “Senators and Representatives who are willing to stand up and fight night and day for Federal statutes drawn to meet actual needs”—“laws with teeth in them which go to the root of the problems; which remove the inequities, raise the standards, and, over a period of years, give constant improvement to the conditions of human life” in Georgia. FDR’s tone was becoming more and more heavy and deliberate. Senator George, he said, was his friend, and a “gentleman and a scholar,” but on “most public questions he and I do not speak the same language.” George had neither the “constant active fighting attitude” that was needed, nor did he believe “deep down in his heart” in those objectives. Mixed cheers and boos arose from the crowd. FDR spoke slightingly of another aspirant for the Senate, former governor Eugene Talmadge, as a man merely of promises and panaceas, and strongly lauded the administration candidate, Lawrence Camp, an able young attorney.
On the platform, George rose to the occasion. “Mr. President,” he said, “I want you to know that I accept the challenge.” FDR replied blithely, “Let’s always be friends.”
Ignoring rising criticism throughout the South, FDR carried on. Next stop was South Carolina. The president had time for only a brief stop, but he did not waste the opportunity. Senator Ellison D. “Cotton Ed” Smith was having an unusual experience: He faced serious primary opposition for the first time in many years. Inveighing against the wages and hours bill, Cotton Ed had implied that, in his state, fifty cents a day was ample to support a family. After the usual back-platform homily, the president got in a shot at Smith as the train started to pull out: “I don’t believe any family or man can live on fifty cents a day.”
Roosevelt’s remaining target was much farther to the north, in a border state still with a southern culture. He may have liked good old Walter George, but he despised his longtime foe, the urbane Senator Millard Tydings, who, he told a press conference, had run “with the Roosevelt prestige and the money of his conservative Republican friends both on his side,” and he told the reporters that they could put this in direct quotes. Putting his biggest purge effort of all into the defeat of Tydings, the president lined up Maryland politicians behind Tydings’s primary foe, Representative David Lewis. He asked the ambassador to Italy, Breckinridge Long, a wealthy Maryland politico, to provide some campaign money, and he personally stumped the state for two days in September.
FDR wove his attack on the privileged, reactionary minority into his praise of Representative Lewis. At a Labor Day address in Maryland, the president declared that the “cold-blooded few” who were “shortsightedly sure” that their interests lay in exploiting working people had adopted a strategy to divide and conquer, to turn working people against one another, making them “blind to their common interests,” creating “a new class feeling among people like ourselves, who instinctively are not class conscious.” The plutocrats, not the president, followed an ideology based on class. Lewis, on the other hand, had championed the Workmen’s Compensation Act and old-age pensions and unemployment insurance; he symbolized, FDR assured the crowd, “the American tradition of equality.”
It was all in vain. All three of FDR’s main targets—George, Smith, and Tydings—won handsomely. “It’s a bust,” said Farley sourly, echoing the views of many party regulars, and a bust it was. Other anti-New Dealers or semi-New Dealers won. There was one bright spot: John J. O’Connor’s defeat in Manhattan after a hard and concentrated effort by White House operatives. But the overall results were poor. “It takes a long, long time,” FDR remarked during the purge campaign, “to bring the past up to the present.”
The problem was the tenacity of the past, especially in the South. By 1938 anti-New Deal southern Democratic leaders no longer merely differed with FDR’s liberalism. They had come to fear a president who seemed determined to curb their political power and the economic interests and racist attitudes they represented. FDR’s pushing through the abolition of the two-thirds rule in Democratic presidential conventions had left southern Democrats with no veto power over the choice of his successors. And his sweeping 1934 and 1936 gains in Congress had left them without their old legislative veto power on Capitol Hill. This impotence led to fear, which in turn led to immense personal and political anger toward FDR and his White House “liberal cabal.”
Inevitably, southern Democrats looked for allies. They had long held hands with conservative northern Democrats of the “old Cleveland party,” but these “Bourbons” were few in number and even fewer in influence. What about combining with the Grand Old Party, with which many southern conservatives had been in de facto alliances, especially during and since the Supreme Court fight? It was not a new idea. In June 1936 the stoutly Republican New York Herald Tribune had urged the Republican convention to choose a conservative Democrat for vice president, and even Landon evidently was taken by the idea. That summer some “National Jeffersonian Democrats,” as they liked to call themselves, broke with FDR. Republicans made overtures to the rebels, but party and ideological differences prevailed. “I am unable to see much difference between Roosevelt and Landon,” said crusty old Carter Glass, the conservative Democratic senator from Virginia, “except that the former is a first-class New Dealer and the latter a second-rate New Dealer.”
The court fight the next year not only eroded FDR’s political prestige but also triggered renewed coalition efforts between southern Democrats and northern Republicans. GOP senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan wrote Landon that he might support a conservative Democrat heading a union ticket in 1940. Landon himself, noting that three years earlier he had said “we would not whip Mr. Roosevelt until we combined, as the Liberals and Conservatives did in England in 1929 against the Labor-Socialist party,” still eyed this course after his 1936 defeat. But a redoubtable array of leaders stood in their path: Republican regulars, from national chairman John D. M. Hamilton down to county organizations, who believed that the GOP could win on its own in 1940—so why share power with any Democrats?
While conservatives were enjoying enticing notions of bipartisan coalition, FDR’s own coalition had come under severe pressure. His somewhat tattered battalions still included union workers, farmers enjoying price supports, middle-class professionals (save for most physicians), southern Democrats “till the last dog dies,” progressives in the TR and Wilson tradition, and numerous mercantile and financial leaders. But labor was still divided by disputes between craft and industrial unions; farm owners feared farm labor costs while tenant farmers and field laborers complained that agricultural benefits did not even trickle down to them; southern regulars were increasingly upset by Eleanor Roosevelt’s—and FDR’s?—friendliness toward African-Americans; and progressives were disunited as usual.
The progressives indeed posed a special problem for the president. Active in both parties, they had given him crucial congressional votes in 1933 and 1935. Several had later deserted him in the court fight, and others on executive reorganization and even the wages-and-hours bill. Two of the most loyal were senators George Norris and Robert La Follette. Two of the least were senators Hiram Johnson and William Borah. Others were hopelessly unpredictable in the eyes of White House tacticians. By 1938, progressive leaders and rank and file in both parties were eyeing Wisconsin as the showplace for a new progressivism that would attract liberals from both parties. Why not a new progressive party that would realign American party politics toward a clear-cut confrontation between a committed progressive and a stalwartly conservative party?
It was not Bob La Follette but his brother Philip, Progressive party governor of Wisconsin, who took the lead toward a new party. After several months of furious preparation, the governor announced the formation of National Progressives of America at a rally in the spring of 1938. If the arena decoration—including a party emblem of red, white, and blue—smacked somewhat of fascist mass meetings abroad, for many progressives across the country the new party offered new hope. But the reception among liberal and left leaders of all stripes reflected again their divisions. Senator Norris, perennial Socialist-candidate-for-president Norman Thomas, United Mine Workers head John L. Lewis, New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, The Nation, and The New Republic were not impressed.
Nor was FDR—but he responded with ridicule rather than reflection. “Did you know,” he wrote Ambassador Phillips in Rome, “that Phil La Follette started his Third Party with a huge meeting in Wisconsin, the chief feature of which was the dedication of a new emblem—a twenty-foot-wide banner with a red circle and a blue cross on it? While the crowd present was carried away with the enthusiasm of the moment, most of the country seem to think this was a feeble imitation of the Swastika. All that remains is for some major party to adopt a new form of arm salute. I have suggested the raising of both arms above the head, followed by a bow from the waist. At least this will be good for people’s figures!”
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So it was some rather shaky New Deal constituencies that the president led into the fall election campaign of 1938. Instead of commanding a grand and united coalition, as in 1936, he spent much time putting out brush-fires. He found it necessary to defend Democratic governor Frank Murphy of Michigan against charges—made before the the new House Un-American Activities Committee—that Murphy had been a communist dupe when he refused to obey a court order to evict striking workers at a General Motors factory. He had to declare his support in California of Sheridan Downey as a real liberal despite the “$30 every Thursday” pledge, after the young Californian had beaten the old Wilsonian war horse, Senator McAdoo, in a turbulent primary. He had to tiptoe cautiously between Democratic regulars and pro-New Deal progressives. Political practicalities forced him to pay more attention than he would have liked to crucial state races, especially in New York, where Governor Lehman and Senator Wagner were seeking reelection.
It was widely assumed that the Democrats would lose ground on Capitol Hill in the 1938 elections. The Democratic majority had been so large—both houses were more than two-thirds Democratic—that Democrats had become prone to internecine struggles between conservative and liberal party members. And midterm elections almost invariably (save in 1934!) went against the incumbent president. But few—not even the realistic FDR himself—could have anticipated the electoral blow that fell on the Democratic party. Republican strength rose in the House from 88 to 169, and in the Senate by 8. The GOP lost not a single seat, while the liberal bloc in the House was halved. Many state races too went badly for the Democrats. Winning over a dozen governorships, the Republicans offered some fresher and younger faces to the nation: Leverett Saltonstall in Massachusetts, John Bricker in Ohio, Harold Stassen in Minnesota.
There were other happy portents for the GOP. A new face from a venerable Republican family emerged in Ohio as their next senator; Robert A. Taft, the son of Cousin Ted’s vice president and successor, won handsomely. Wagner and Lehman both won in New York, but a brilliant and personable young district attorney, Thomas E. Dewey, came so close to beating the “unbeatable” Lehman that the challenger immediately became a “hot prospect” for his party’s presidential nomination in 1940. And the GOP got rid of some possible future threats, as George Earle lost in Pennsylvania, Frank Murphy in Michigan, and—after his euphoric summer—Philip La Follette in Wisconsin.
As usual, the president refused to acknowledge defeat. The New Deal had not been repudiated, he told friends. The trouble lay in a lot of local conditions: factionalism, corruption, petty squabbles. After all, he noted, the Democrats still held big majorities in both chambers of Congress. He found other comfort in the results.
“Besides cleaning out some bad local situations, we have on the positive side eliminated Phil La Follette and the Farmer-Labor people in the Northwest as a standing Third Party threat,” he wrote Daniels. “They must and will come to us if we remain definitely the liberal party.” The president already had 1940 in mind. “Frankly,” he went on, “I think the idea is slowly getting through the heads of people like Tydings and George and Bennett Clark that even if they control the 1940 Convention they cannot elect their ticket without the support of this Administration—and I am sufficiently honest to decline to support a conservative Democrat.”
But what about the two years in between? “Will you not encounter coalition opposition?” a reporter asked at the first press conference after the election.
“No, I don’t think so,” the president said blithely.
“I do!” the questioner shot back, amid general laughter.
With his usual indomitability the president could hardly see that the reporter was right, that a new conservative coalition could block any major extension of the New Deal. And it was even harder for FDR to accept the fact that the New Deal had been stopped dead in its tracks—and at a point where the New Deal, by his own standards, had been only two-thirds fulfilled, at best.
Some of its failings were only too evident in 1938. Even after the stimulus given by the renewed WPA and PWA spending, many millions of Americans remained jobless. Tens of millions of family members were still in want. Later statistics would back up current observation: Hourly wages in manufacturing had risen by 1937 on the average only six cents above that in 1929. The percentage of women of working age in the labor force had barely risen since 1930.
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Was it inevitable that the New Deal, like so many reform movements, would peter out after a few years? There were many reasons to think that this reform movement would not. It was led by a president and, increasingly, by a first lady who were absolutely committed to extensive, even transforming, change. This leader was enormously gifted as propagandist, politician, and hands-on practitioner. After much experimenting, the White House had worked out a comprehensive and relatively coherent policy agenda, which was ratified by the Democratic national party in its 1936 platform, on which in turn FDR campaigned for triumphant reelection. He had the support of a remarkably gifted and dedicated set of White House advisers, tens of thousands of local party activists, tens of millions of voters across the nation, and of Democratic majorities in Congress.
The South—where FDR made his boldest political commitment in 1938—was a special target for change for both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, though they had somewhat different priorities. FDR’s strategy for southern change emphasized economic measures. TVA and PWA building programs put southerners to work, including some African-Americans. Both Roosevelts were particularly hopeful about the role of young southerners. “They say that the Democratic Party can’t be liberal because of the South but things are moving toward progression in the South,” the president observed to TVA director David Lilienthal. The Old Guard leaders like Mississippi senator Pat Harrison, FDR went on, would be recalcitrant, but “the young people in the South, and the women, they are thinking about economic problems and will be part of a liberal group.”
FDR’s southern economic strategy was two-pronged. The South, he urged, must develop regionally, and this was possible only with industrialization. The South needed factories that based their strength not on low wages but on advanced technology and marketing and on paying wages that could create purchasing power as a basis for further economic development. The second prong pushed for integration of the southern economy into the national one. Nationwide thinking, planning, and action were essential for progress.
Though the president played up his affinity with the South as his second home and Georgia as his “second state,” he did not resort to “southern charm” in addressing the South on its deep-seated economic problems. Better schools, better health, better hospitals, better highways would “not come to us in the South if we oppose progress—if we believe in our hearts that the feudal system is the best system.” That a president who usually played his political cards with great caution could speak so bluntly was a measure of FDR’s deep commitment to southern economic change.
Thus the “purge” was essentially a bold extension of a bold policy. Yet it was solidly grounded in economics. After concentrating relief and recovery funds in the South for several years, the president brought his economic strategy to its height in 1938 by staging a conference on the economic conditions of the south, composed of industry, labor, farm, government, and press representatives—and all southerners.
The conference’s report thoroughly justified that label. Addressing fifteen topics, the “Report on Economic Conditions in the South” covered a dismal inventory from poor health care to deplorable housing, from soil depletion and other environmental neglect to economic backwardness, from sheer poverty to sheer human misery.
The report catalyzed feelings North and South. Not all southerners were opposed. Texas representative Maury Maverick, celebrated as the author of a definition of democracy as “liberty plus groceries,” went right to FDR’s point: “Let’s join the United States.” A handful of southern senators and newspapers applauded the report. But most of the top economic and political leadership in the Deep South reflected anger and indignation. The Southern States Industrial Council, which lobbied against higher wages for southern workers, said the report “did the South a grave injustice.” Carter Glass and other senators denounced it. Northern liberals applauded the document, while Northern conservatives looked on FDR’s whole enterprise as one more New Deal intervention against states’ rights, the free market, and individual enterprise.
Franklin Roosevelt did not have to be a Marxist to assume that invigorating the South’s economy was the first and indispensable step toward reforming its politics. The 1938 “purge” effort had soon followed on publication of the report. Here he ran headlong into an opposition that was even more backward and hidebound than the South’s economy. He encountered states’ rights ideas that would reserve crucial economic decisions for regional, state, and local politicians, who in turn drew their power from voting arrangements that excluded millions of poor whites as well as African-Americans; legislatures that overrepresented rural areas; Republican “opposition” parties that were in fact moribund; strong legislatures representing local and corporate interests, relatively weak governors, and powerful county Democratic committees responsive to local business pressures—in short, a politics of local oligarchies that barred intervention from the federal government and sometimes even state government. Years later the most acute student of southern politics, the distinguished southern political scientist V. O. Key, would conclude, “The South may not be the nation’s number-one political problem,” but “politics is the South’s number-one problem.”
Thus FDR was encountering a citadel of power all the more effective because it typically presented its battlements in the form of local institutions, laid-back southern pols, and a superficial southern charm. But even more potent was the ideology that undergirded all these arrangements and institutions—a pervasive and unrelenting racism. To challenge southern power inevitably was to evoke cries against “nigger-loving” outsiders, even on the part of some of the seemingly most genteel of southern gentlemen.
How to attack such a citadel? Roosevelt’s answer had been to attack a few of the commanders, rather than the citadel itself. But the citadel, having been long abuilding, was rooted now in the southern economy, polity, and culture. During a few months in 1938 the president tried to mobilize small political forces, living off the land. FDR’s trumpet call, at the gates of Jericho, disappeared into the air, unheard. The “purge” was a hopeless enterprise from the start.
How could the president, with his fine grasp of southern economics and with his long acquaintance with the South and with many of its politicos, stumble so badly? The answer lay in FDR’s utterly personal reaction to the obstruction to the New Deal program the voters had endorsed by the tens of millions in 1936. He was angry, not at parties or institutions or “historic trends” but at persons —the individuals who stood in the way of justice and progress. Ever one to personalize politics, to think in terms of specific politicians, their strengths and their weaknesses, he took out his feelings on immediate targets, ones he hoped might be dissolved.
Close observers had never found FDR so aroused, so furious at “desertions,” so bent on revenge, as he became after the court defeat. Farley found him, for weeks and months afterward, “smoldering against the members of his own party.” George Creel, a longtime friend and close observer, wrote later that the president “took no pains to hide his anger.” His “resentment crystallized into the desire to crush all who conspired against the throne.”
Anger evoked anger. Senators, though often concealing their resentment, were furious over the president’s highhandedness, as they saw it, during the 1937-38 conflicts. They could not ignore Roosevelt’s handing out carefully measured plaudits, criticism, coolness, and nonrecognition, before and during the purge, much like a headmaster giving out rewards and reproofs. He was exacting a “high school girl revenge,” complained a Saturday Evening Post writer. The president compounded all this by hitting recalcitrant legislators where it hurt, in their states and districts, by cutting off patronage and withholding federal aid projects. Southern politicians responded in the only way they knew how—by exploiting every veto trap, every malrepresentative institution, every special-interest device, every racist angle embedded in the southern political system.
FDR thought and acted in terms of specific situations, not vast systems. He probably did not realize, despite his long acquaintance with southern racial customs, how deeply embedded in racism was southern politics. Eleanor Roosevelt did have a clear sense of southern racism—and believed, even more than FDR did, in the need to approach the problem through economic measures as well as through social change and political reform.
Addressing three hundred members of the Junior League of New York City in November 1933, Eleanor had described a man most of her listeners could hardly imagine—a man who had been imprisoned for stealing food for his starving family. While in jail the man had been a model prisoner, but upon his release he declared to the warden that he would steal again if necessary.
“I wouldn’t blame him,” Eleanor confessed to her audience. “You would be a poor wishy-washy sort of person if you didn’t take anything you could when your family was starving. Put yourself in someone else’s position, thinking what right others have to more than they need when you haven’t anything. Civilization is not going to last based on such conditions in various parts of the country.”
Eleanor was speaking toughly and from the heart. Not many would have addressed decorous upper-class philanthropists in such a manner. But she knew this audience: Fear of social upheaval was a sure way to arouse the upper and middle classes to the need for reform. And when angry letters denounced her statement, as reported in the press, she calmly defended her position. “Revolutions do not start until great groups of people are suffering and convinced of the hopelessness of their cause getting a fair hearing.... Certain changes must come!”
Speaking out on controversial issues, working behind the scenes on others, inviting socially conscious groups to meet at the White House, tirelessly lobbying for the things she believed in—Eleanor was crafting a shadow New Deal. She could venture where Franklin could not go, politically as well as physically. She took stands on issues when he could not, listened to petitions he had to turn away, entertained ideas that were politically dangerous. Sometimes this meant waxing enthusiastic over Utopian ideas the president shrugged off as ludicrous and impossible. But it also meant that, through his wife, Franklin could appease groups whose proposals he had to defer as well as come into contact with reformers, radicals, and a variety of civic leaders whom he would not otherwise have met. “Eleanor had a lot of’do-gooders’ to dinner last night,” he would mention to a staff member the following morning, “and you know what that means.”
It was not always clear when Eleanor had Franklin’s direct support and when she was acting on her own, and both the president and the first lady preferred it that way. He could remain apart and gauge the political effect when she took a strong position; Eleanor, meanwhile, knew she had more influence when people thought her husband was behind her. On many issues he would explain to her what his policies were. In a talk to one group of women, Eleanor began, “I was talking with a man the other day, and he said ...” When one member of her audience asked who the man was who had made such probing points, she replied, “Franklin.”
She never forgot the mood she had sensed, like an ominous rumble of thunder, among miners in Morgantown, West Virginia. In other places as well, throughout America—in city slums, on impoverished farms, among the unemployed, the hungry, the bitter—men and women were still in want and despair and needed to know that the government was aware and concerned. Regarding young people in particular, “It was essential to restore their faith in the power of democracy to meet their needs, or they would take the natural path of looking elsewhere.” Nothing, in her view, was more likely to bring on chaos and revolution than an indifferent or repressive government. As she saw it, the New Deal was a bulwark against communism.
One way Eleanor reached out to people was through her writing. Her daily column “My Day,” begun at the end of 1935 at the invitation of the United Feature Syndicate, reached tens of thousands of readers. Her autobiography, This Is My Story, came out in 1938. In both she shared the homey details of White House life, some of which were not so different from her readers’ own concerns. Offering a vision of wholesome values, of family love and solidarity, of caring and commitment, she provided reassuring glimpses of Franklin as the ideal father, serious and concerned yet capable of having fun, steady as an experienced captain piloting through stormy seas.
Eleanor was serious about her column, partly because of her admiration for the journalism profession and partly because it fulfilled her longing for the discipline of a job. She was under contract for five-hundred-word pieces six days a week and took great pains to meet deadlines, whether she was working, traveling, celebrating, vacationing, or nursing a sick family member. But she also understood the power of her column. Through her words, millions of Americans received a daily picture of a sane, caring, gracious White House. And occasionally she would disclose some new development that Franklin was not ready to publicize, forcing him to adopt the habit of warning her when their conversation was straying off the record. She donated most of her writing and speaking fees—for radio broadcasts and for lecture tours around the country—to the American Friends Service Committee.
So much did Eleanor journey around the country that one headline in the Washington Post announced MRS. ROOSEVELT SPENDS NIGHT AT WHITE HOUSE. “She travels—and how she travels—the U.S. 1 of middle-class psychology,” The Nation reported, “and she combines in her person all those qualities that please and flatter it most.” Her causes seemed almost endless: “Rural arts, housing, country life, WPA libraries, public health, community centers for Negroes, flood control, the eight-hour day for nurses, safety campaigns, white and black cooperation, education. But they are all sugar-coated with accounts of the dinners for the Supreme Court justices and Cabinet receptions which delight the hearts of people who would scorn her social views if they were presented by a solemn social worker.”
Eleanor’s top priority, in both her writing and her politics, was to include those who had been on the outside looking in at American prosperity: African-Americans, women, children. Perhaps, having grown up an outsider, she was especially sensitive to the injustice of leaving so many out of the American dream. One December evening in 1938, attending a dinner to raise money for European refugees, she heard speech after speech praising America as the land of the free. The next morning she roused the readers of her normally cheery column with a passionate question: “Are you free if you cannot vote, if you cannot be sure that the same justice will be meted out to you as to your neighbor, if you are expected to live on a lower level than your neighbor and to work for lower wages, if you are barred from certain places and from certain opportunities?”
Earlier in the year she had sounded a similar note, speaking on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. “We still do tolerate slavery in several ways,” she said. “Today we are facing another era in which we have to make certain things become facts rather than beliefs.”
Although she spoke to white audiences about the injustice of discrimination, she sounded a different note when addressing African-Americans, stressing the importance of education and self-discipline. “Anyone in a minority group has got to strive to do a better job,” she said, “not just for himself as an individual, but because it is going to help the whole group that he belongs to and because it is going to have an effect on what all the others are going to be able to do. Every time we fail, every time we do not do our best, we don’t just let ourselves down, we let down all the others that we might help if we did our best and we did succeed.”
Yet Eleanor’s primary style was reactive; she would see a pitiful or unjust situation and respond to it, firing off a letter to the appropriate department head or congressman. Grace Tully, FDR’s secretary, recalled a particularly heartrending letter Eleanor received from a destitute young mother. Eleanor was going out of town, but she asked Tully to take milk and eggs and other necessities to the woman, and on her return she grilled the secretary on the woman’s circumstances: her health, the children’s cleanliness, the condition of the apartment. Then Eleanor proceeded to visit the woman herself and invite her to Hyde Park, where she received instruction as a seamstress. Later, the woman was able to secure a job.
Eleanor helped Morgenthau and Hopkins when they needed $250,000 for milk for needy children in Chicago; she intervened on behalf of striking farmworkers in Arkansas, thirty-five of whom were jailed; she supported and protected women in her husband’s administration, especially Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who often came under fire. Even the peanut vendor who stationed his cart near the White House was rescued by Eleanor from a sweep by the Washington police. “I would myself miss him on that corner,” she wrote FDR’s press secretary. “We had better let him stand at the White House gate.”
In hundreds of cases, big and small, Eleanor followed her heart, believing that something should and could be done and she would be the one to do it. She had an unconquerable sense of responsibility, or, as she put it, “I had this horrible sense of obligation which was bred in me, I couldn’t help it. It was nothing to be proud of, it was just something I couldn’t help.”
As a member of the privileged class that she herself blamed for the problems of the Depression, she felt she personally should do everything possible to correct the situation. She carried in her purse, Eleanor’s friend and biographer Joseph Lash reported, a prayer attributed to St. Francis in which one asks God to grant “that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.”
No group was worse off than African-Americans. As early as mid-1933, when she had been involved in establishing the subsistence homestead in Arthurdale, a controversy had erupted over whether African-Americans would be part of the new community. Black families had been especially hard hit by the collapse of the soft-coal industry in West Virginia.
That fall Eleanor called a meeting of African-American leaders at the White House. Her guests included Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Mordecai Johnson of Howard University; Robert Moton of the Tuskegee Institute, and others. It was the first time that such a distinguished group of Negro leaders had been invited to the White House to discuss issues of burning importance to them.
Hour after hour they bluntly described the crisis among American blacks to Eleanor, Clarence Pickett of the American Friends Service Committee, and the New Deal administrators present. The president joined them briefly around midnight. The leaders agreed that access by African-Americans to the programs and benefits of the New Deal was the most urgent need and that desegregation of the South would have to come second.
Out of that meeting grew Eleanor’s approach to civil rights. Her emphasis would for many years be on equal opportunity, not desegregation. Education and literacy, housing, jobs, equal wages, and equal access to relief: These became her paramount goals. But even more pressing was the attempt to end mob violence against African-Americans. On civil rights in general, and on the issue of lynching in particular, Eleanor was far ahead of Franklin.
Lynching, the extremist nightstick of the white southern establishment, had taken the lives of scores of black men and women during the previous fifty years. Twenty-eight lynchings occurred in 1933 alone. In one case, a young black man was burned at the stake in Princess Anne, Maryland. The state attorney general, who fought to bring the mob of lynchers to justice, was almost lynched himself when he went to the scene. Walter White barely escaped a mob when he went to investigate another lynching.
Because southern states were unwilling to enact legislation against lynching, the NAACP had turned to the federal government. The Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill, sponsored by Senator Rober Wagner of New York and Senator Edward Costigan of Colorado, slowly gained support during the early 1930s, winning endorsements from a number of state legislatures, along with church, labor, women’s, and civil rights groups representing millions of voters. Filibusters, however, continually stalled Senate consideration of the bill. In April 1934 the bill was taken up in the Senate and was quickly condemned by southern senators, who claimed lynching was necessary “to protect the fair womanhood of the South from beasts.” During the Senate debate, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi suggested that all Negroes be sent to Liberia along with Eleanor Roosevelt, who should be made “queen of the Negro nation.” The bill barely hung on the calendar.
During the next few weeks, Walter White tried again and again to meet with the president to elicit his definite stand on the bill. FDR was cautious, concerned that public support of the bill would alienate the Democratic southerners he deemed so critical to passing his New Deal economic measures. In desperation White turned to Eleanor, who he knew was sympathetic to the plight of blacks. She immediately arranged an interview between White and the president.
Franklin was late for the meeting, but he arrived at last, ebullient and, as White later wrote, determined to postpone serious discussion by recounting a series of funny stories.
Finally White managed to turn the conversation to the critical issue at hand. To every objection the president raised to the anti-lynching bill, White had an answer. After a few minutes of this Franklin interrupted. “Somebody’s been priming you. Was it my wife?”
White and Eleanor wanted to stick to the subject; even Franklin’s mother, Sara, who was also present, told her son that she supported White. Franklin burst out laughing.
Then he got serious. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now,” southerners would “block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.” Indeed, southern senators managed that spring to keep the bill from coming to a vote. And though the bill passed in the House of Representatives in 1937 and in 1940, it was defeated both times in the Senate.
Eleanor’s and White’s persistence on the anti-lynching bill exasperated the president. FDR discouraged Eleanor from speaking at a Carnegie Hall anti-lynching protest rally, warning her that if she spoke it would be “dynamite.” But most of the time, she had carte blanche. “You can say anything you want,” FDR allowed, adding, “I can always say, ‘Well, that is my wife; I can’t do anything about her.’” Some of FDR’s advisers, particularly FDR’s press secretary Steve Early, a Virginian, were far more upset. Early, who had barred African-American reporters from covering the president’s press conferences, considered White provocative, “insulting,” and a troublemaker. Eleanor had defended White by saying that although he indeed seemed obsessed with the bill, “if I were colored, I think I should have about the same obsession.”
In early 1939, Eleanor attended the first meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, in Birmingham, Alabama. This group of eighteen hundred delegates viewed economic conditions in the South as the nation’s biggest problem. Housing was desperately inadequate; public education was almost nonexistent for African-Americans, whose schools even had their own specially published textbooks. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers spoke up. Recommendations included more aid for education, extension of the Farm Security Administration programs, repeal of the poll tax, and more. Eleanor spoke on education and brought a letter of support from her husband.
Although the focus of the conference was economic, the reality of southern racism forced the group to address the issue of discrimination right at the start. The city of Birmingham insisted that the conference observe segregation laws and seat white and black delegates in separate parts of the hall. The organization reluctantly decided to comply, in order to proceed. But when Eleanor, accompanied by applause, walked into the hall and noticed the segregated seating, she sat down on the black side, next to her friend Mary McLeod Bethune, director of Negro affairs for the National Youth Administration. One of the officers sent by the sheriff tapped her on the shoulder and told her to move. Eleanor agreed to move her chair to the center line between the black and white delegates, and during the rest of the meeting she carried her little folding chair with her, always placing it in the middle of the room, in a race-free zone of her own.
“If the people of the South do not grasp this gesture, we must,” wrote the weekly Afro-American, in praise. “Sometimes actions speak louder than words.” Another group, the National Conference of Negro Youth, also officially thanked ER for her courage in Birmingham. If Eleanor was a bit less valiant than Rosa Parks, her gesture, in the context of her times, seemed eminently principled. She later would urge that, in defending equal rights and the preservation of civil liberties, “we must have courage; we must not succumb to fear of any kind.”
But civil disobedience was not a possibility for a first lady, and even in the White House the segregation policies of Washington were observed. A few years earlier, in May 1936, Eleanor had invited the students and the staff from the National Training School for Delinquent Girls to a garden party at the White House. Though three-quarters of the girls were African-American, the White House served blacks in one tent, whites in the other.
Eleanor of course entertained African-American friends—like Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter White—in the private quarters of the White House, but the public White House was another story. At public functions, she bowed to segregation laws and even accepted—though reluctantly—Steve Early’s dictum that black women journalists be excluded from her press conferences. Still, the young guests from the National Training School for Delinquent Girls clustered eagerly about the first lady, and Eleanor received praise from the African-American press for hosting the occasion. After the party, she called for a new rehabilitation program for the girls to replace the appalling conditions in the school.
Issues of racism, education, and economics were, Eleanor felt, all intertwined; for racism to end, “the Negro race as a whole must improve its standards of living and become both economically and intellectually of higher caliber.” For long-term solutions to problems of race, she agreed with Franklin’s emphasis on economic reform. “The economic situation,” she wrote in 1940, “is the reason for much of our intolerance today.” The country had to solve its economic problems “or we can never hope to wipe out intolerance.” She suggested to Ralph Bunche, when he interviewed her for Gunnar Myrdal’s book on American democracy and race relations, An American Dilemma, that often class—hence economic justice—and not race was the problem.
Another incident caused a firestorm, forcing Eleanor to assert herself again on the question of race. In 1936, she had invited Marian Anderson, the celebrated soprano, to sing at the White House. Three years later, in early 1939, Howard University wanted to present Anderson in concert in Washington’s Constitution Hall, the largest auditorium in the city. The Daughters of the American Revolution, who controlled the hall, refused to let an African-American artist perform there.
Eleanor debated how to respond. In the past when she disagreed with a policy or action of an organization, she had remained a member and tried to influence it from within. But now she found herself in disagreement with a group’s basic tenet. “They have taken an action which has been widely talked of in the press,” she wrote. “To remain as a member implies approval of that action.” In a gesture that separated the woman she had become from the woman she had been brought up to be, Eleanor resigned from the DAR. Endicott Peabody, the headmaster of Groton and friend of TR and FDR, wrote to voice support for her rejection of the “prejudice, I might say cruelty, with which we have dealt with the negro people. Your courage in taking this definite stand called for my admiration.”
The concert featuring Marian Anderson did take place—free and in the open air—in a location charged with symbolic meaning: in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Seventy-five thousand people heard Marian Anderson sing “America” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” “The whole setting was unique, majestic, and impressive,” Harold Ickes wrote in his diary. But Eleanor was absent, fearful of antagonizing southern voters and politicians even more.
To some extent, ER’s attitudes toward race and prejudice were shaped by her upbringing and her times. Her paternal grandmother, the mother of Theodore and Elliott, had grown up in a slave-owning family in Georgia, and little Eleanor had heard her great-aunt Annie Bulloch Gracie describe plantation life and the slaves who slept at the foot of their masters’ beds. “I quite understand the southern point of view,” Eleanor told southerners. When she used terms like “pickaninny” and “darky,” that was part of the intimate language of her family. When readers of the second installment of her memoirs protested against her use of the word “darky,” Eleanor responded that the word was used by her great-aunt as a “term of affection” and that she had “always considered it in that light,” but she would try to abstain from repeating the offense.
Still, the mentality of the times permitted only limited progress. Replying to people who criticized her for inviting and dining with Negro children in Hyde Park, she wrote that “eating with someone does not mean you believe in intermarriage.” At the National Conference on Fundamental Problems in the Education of Negroes, she told delegates that education for the Negro people should help them develop their special talents, for “we know that there are in every race certain gifts.” Among the “gifts” of African-Americans, she could not resist mentioning “music and rhythm.” And she entitled an article on race written in 1953, “Some of My Best Friends Are Negro.”
But a few unfortunate choices of words and an occasional recourse to retrograde stereotypes cannot diminish ER’s ardent commitment to equal rights. If she was less than an incendiary firebrand on race, she was more vocal, consistent, and brave on racial justice than anyone else in the administration, save perhaps Harold Ickes, who had been president of the Chicago chapter of the NAACP. “Sometimes it is better to fight hard with conciliatory methods,” she wrote to a WPA teacher. “The South is changing, but don’t push too hard.” Within a few years, however, she would start to push harder.
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While African-Americans were victims of the Depression and racism, American youths were also suffering. Three million American young people, Frances Perkins estimated, were out of school and unemployed. “I have moments of real terror,” Eleanor confessed, “when I think we may be losing this generation. We have got to bring these young people into the active life of the community and make them feel that they are necessary.” Only a “pretty poor” civilization, she wrote, does not provide a way for its young people to earn a living. FDR had considered the Civilian Conservation Corps and its reforestation camps adequate to meet those needs. Eleanor liked the CCC in theory but felt it was too militaristic; she wanted instead to put the spirit and idealism of young people to work in a mission to rebuild America.
Collaborating in 1934 with Harry Hopkins, soon to head the WPA, his assistant Aubrey Williams, who had been a social worker in Alabama, and numerous young people, she conceived a two-year volunteer program. Young people who were out of school and jobless would work in government jobs or on public service projects—hospitals, settlement houses, schools, libraries—and live in camps. Hopkins and Williams asked her to present the idea to the president, fearing he would reject it for political reasons—that a government youth program seemed too much like the regimentation of youth under Hitler.
Franklin’s response, according to Eleanor, was, “If it is the right thing to do for the young people, then it should be done. I guess we can stand the criticism, and I doubt if our youth can be regimented in this way or in any other way.”
Not long after, the National Youth Administration was born, with an initial budget of $50 million in relief funds. “It was one of the occasions on which I was very proud that the right thing was done regardless of political considerations’ Eleanor later wrote, pleased that “it turned out to be politically popular and strengthened the administration greatly.”
Eleanor cared passionately about the NYA, checking monthly reports sent her by Aubrey Williams, who had become head of the department. But she was also aware of criticism—from the National Educational Association and from Republican politicians. Defending the NYA against critics who branded it ineffective and wasteful, Eleanor observed that although the program did not offer a fundamental solution to enduring problems, we “bought ourselves time to think” while providing “hope at a time when young people were desperate.” She was also aware of criticism from within the program; she knew that when young people emerged from the work camps, they often could find no jobs. Some gravitated to the American Youth Congress, a turbulent body of youth agencies, rife with internecine conflict among socialist, communist, and democratic groups, that by 1936 had a decidedly radical, anti-New Deal outlook.
Convinced that “every shade of thought should be represented in every Youth Congress,” Eleanor agreed to attend a meeting of the American Youth Congress in January 1936 and field questions. Though the questioners were hostile to New Deal “sops” and demanded an “American Youth Act” costing billions of dollars, a tactful, patient, and open-minded Eleanor remained unfazed, even when she was attacked for using “empty rhetoric” by the Young Communist League. Reminded by their brashness of her own children, she appreciated their determination to confront problems of unemployment, racism, education, and economic equality. One of the student leaders she met in 1936 was Joseph Lash, who became her lifelong friend and perceptive biographer.
While insisting that youth congress leaders take a more realistic approach to their proposals, she continued to speak to youth representatives—even inviting them to tea at the White House—about difficult subjects, for example discussing with pacifist youth the dangers of isolationism. The American Youth Congress, and the Popular Front of which it was a member, began actively to support the programs of the New Deal, no longer calling for enactment of the American Youth Act but instead lobbying for more support for the NYA.
But the right wing never let up; now they attacked her for her support of young people. When she attended the Second World Youth Congress, which took place at Vassar College—close to Hyde Park—in August 1938, the Roman Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts of America, and various right-wing groups charged that she was collaborating in a communist-dominated organization. For her part, Eleanor responded that she had “no doubt that there are many Communists among [the delegates], but they are not strong enough to rule the entire group.” She had gone to the Congress “to find out what these young people are thinking about.” They, after all, would have to solve the problems of the future.
The delegates’ fairmindedness and mutual respect struck her. “The Chinese listened while the Japanese spoke; the boy from India spoke with the British delegates sitting not far away,” she wrote. “I have been in lots of gatherings of adults who did not show that kind of respect for others’ points of view.” As one young delegate recalled, “She didn’t go around talking down to us. She came right in to every session, sat with earphones like everyone else. Ate ice cream cones and [conversed] with hundreds of delegates. Never forget the time she became so interested in the story of a Chinese student that she ruined an expensive summer dress by letting ice cream goo drip all over it.” At one evening’s activities, she was greeted with a standing ovation. The young people, she wrote to Lorena Hickok, were “so earnest and full of hope” she would try to help them as much as she could. And she did—showing up uninvited, in December 1939, at hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had subpoenaed members of the American Youth Congress.
The National Youth Administration was not a fundamental answer, she told the American Youth Congress in the winter of 1939, but it was “something which has given us hope.”
If the New Dealers were treading heavy water by late 1938, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s “shadow New Deal” was but a promise of things to come, Franklin Roosevelt could take enormous satisfaction in one program that appeared to be achieving the kind of social transformation—real change in people’s lives—that he sought so ardently. This was regional development of the Tennessee River valley. He rarely seemed happier than when inspecting dams and homesteads and newly formed lakes in the “valley.”
For FDR the TVA was a dream—a dream that embraced a multitude of visions, visions that illuminated a variety of plans, plans that laid out hundreds of practical actions, actions carried out with shovels and trowels—the dream of a people living harmoniously, productively, in a great river valley. The visions encompassed the protection and enhancing of mountains and rivers, forests and farmlands, life in communities and along streams and lakes. The practical tasks were innumerable, ranging from digging soil-erosion ditches to the building of enormous dams.
In a variety of ways, directly and indirectly, the TVA dream was the collective product of a stunning diversity of talents: Gifford Pinchot, TR’s national forester, Bull Mooser, and Pennsylvania reform governor, who served as a personal link between the two President Roosevelts; Henry Ford, who wanted to buy and build Muscle Shoals and other dams, not only for his own industrial expansion but also to plant new towns and small subsistence farms along the Tennessee River in order to decentralize industry and restore small-town life; Morris L. Cooke, an expert in scientific management who had worked with Brandeis and Frankfurter, joined TR progressives as a foe of high utility and freight rates, and served as FDR’s first head of the Rural Electrification Administration, which helped decentralize industry; social analyst Howard Odum at the University of North Carolina, who with colleagues there saw regional planning in the South as “salvaging marginal highlanders” and perhaps ushering in a “folk renaissance”; Lewis Mumford, literary and architectural critic, regional and urban planner, who for a time had high hopes for TVA but later turned against it for its failures, as he saw them, in large-scale regional planning, new town development, and decent housing.
Such diverse talents and interests—and those of scores of others of almost equal brilliance—guaranteed both that TVA would foster a multiplicity of theories as to how to unlock the human and economic potential of the valley and that it would provide a collective if divided leadership in carrying out the resulting policies and practices. This diversity of leadership was reflected in the three men FDR chose to head the Tennessee Valley Authority: Chairman Arthur E. Morgan, a widely experienced civil engineer, progressive educator, and visionary who saw TVA as a model for watershed multipurpose planning in the United States and around the world; Harcourt A. Morgan, another university administrator, an agriculturalist with special interest in cheap fertilizers, relatively cautious in his approach to social reform; and David E. Lilienthal, a much younger man than the other two, a Harvard Law School graduate who had much impressed Frankfurter, a disciple of the La Follettes, chairman of the Wisconsin Public Service Commission, and a biting critic of private utility policies and pricing.
Such dissimilar men, and the collective political and intellectual creativity that lay behind them, were indispensable for the task of carrying out the TVA’s various interrelated functions: the making of cheap power, comprehensive flood control, reforestation, restoring soil and controlling erosion while retiring marginal land, building new homes and communities, creating lakes and other recreational venues, encouraging local small industries and handicrafts, and undergirding schools and libraries. The TVA idea “touches and gives life to all forms of human concerns,” FDR said.
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Who were the inhabitants of the Tennessee River valley? Northern TVA planners found the valley people as heterogeneous and individualistic as they had expected, but even more wanting and needy than they had imagined. “Battered old cars, dangling radio aerials, rust-eaten tractors, and abandoned threshing machines and hay balers scattered forlornly about”—this was the typical southern landscape described by agrarians like Frank Owsley. Cold statistics presented an even bleaker picture. Per capita income in the region was about half the national average. Less than 3 percent of the valley’s farms were wired for electricity. Horribly eroded gullies, with their grassless and treeless banks, were the visible products of decades of overgrazing, overplanting, crops without roots, and general neglect.
The most telling human tragedy lay in the poor health of much of the valley people. Hookworm, pellagra, and malaria were widespread in the rural regions, black lung in the mining districts. The psychological toll was heavy too, for people displayed strange passivity in the face of suffering, leading to political apathy and what some local physicians termed a “chronic passive-dependency syndrome.”
Deprivation was one of the few conditions that people of the region had in common; despite Washington impressions that a great river drainage area would show some economic and cultural coherence, the Tennessee River valley, reaching far out beyond its tributaries, encompassed a multitude of subcultures. The most striking difference lay between the hills and “hollers” of the Appalachians, the Piedmont areas fronting the eastern coastlines, and the rich meadows of the bluegrass regions lying hundreds of miles to the west. The region was peopled by Germans and other immigrant groups, as well as the more numerous Scotch-Irish, and by significant numbers of African-Americans, though far fewer than in the Deep South.
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Could the valley be changed? What kind of leadership would be required? A host of architects, dam constructors, community planners, craftsmen, electrical engineers, road builders, and landscape designers moved into the valley to change the very physical appearance of the region. But from the start, planners knew that not things but people would need to change, in order to reach beyond even the TVA’s lofty goals of higher pay, decent homes, cheaper power, and all the rest. But could people be changed?
To these questions, FDR and the TVA board were sensitive from the start. They had heard enough sermons about “do-gooders” trying to change people’s lives. They knew, too, that overly intrusive programs would set off flash floods of indignant outcries about states’ rights, northern interference in southern ways, and “socialism.” But even more, these were leaders—not only Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt but the people around them—who had a sense of people’s needs, hopes, and longings. From the start, the TVA stressed administrative decentralization of policy making—and decision making—as a means of fostering local democratic participation. Moreover, the TVA decentralized itself, by establishing its headquarters not in Washington but in Knoxville, Tennessee.
As the TVA building programs proceeded smoothly, the figures began piling up: twenty-one large dams under construction within the TVA’s first five years; flood-control programs so extensive as to contain twenty inches of rain a day for twenty days straight; an enormous channel-dredging program that opened up the Tennessee and its major tributaries to vessels drawing up to nine feet; creation of a string of lakes that offered vast new opportunities for swimming, boating, and fishing; support for regional school and library programs. The most visible of these programs was cheap electricity production from the burgeoning dams; well over a million farms were soon using electricity for the first time, at rates the TVA set at about half the national average.
Integrating these programs called for consummate teamwork in the field. Paradoxically (but perhaps inevitably), however, team spirit was notably lacking in Knoxville. From almost their first meeting, Chairman Arthur Morgan and David Lilienthal differed over central TVA strategy and even philosophy. For the chairman, the TVA was not primarily “a dambuilding program, fertilizer job, or power-transmission job” but a comprehensive plan for a “designed and planned social economic order.” To Lilienthal the production of electricity and its transmission though the TVA lines to the farthest hollows and hamlets was central to the goals of the entire project. Infuriated by Lilienthal’s relentless support of power production, and alarmed by the intensity of the opposition of private utilities in the valley, Morgan complained to key members of Congress and eventually in a letter to The New York Times about Lilienthal’s “intrigue” and malevolence. Refusing to back up his charges, Morgan was dismissed by FDR.
All this was a long way from the busy, bustling TVA world in its valley. By the late 1930s it was clear that the dream, the visions, and the multitude of plans were working effectively, in some cases with stunning impact on the valley’s social and economic landscape. After visiting the region, Eleanor Roosevelt announced that “a more prosperous region would have been hard to find.” Her typically rosy view is supported by the TVA’s accomplishments—from power and flood control to malaria control to library bookmobiles, from recreational lakes to architectural design. “No other agency did so much to alter the mores of the region,” concluded New Deal historian William Leuchtenburg.
Was the TVA then an act of transformational leadership on the part of the New Deal? If bringing people light for their reading and power for their washing machines, books into their homes and literacy so they could read them, low-cost recreation and community health programs, modern fertilizers and richer farmlands, protection from rampaging rivers and from erosion—if these and countless other programs amounted to a transformation in their lives, the TVA provided such leadership. But if this kind of leadership also required enduring changes in attitudes, class and race relationships, and cultural understanding and shifts away from parochialism and provincialism, progress could be neither so easily measured nor evaluated. Lewis Mumford and other social critics saw the TVA—from their own limited urban viewpoints—as a potentially magnificent social revolution that never quite came off.
In one other respect the TVA was a failure, mainly for no fault of its own. Just as its power production and distribution program was conceived as a yardstick by which the performance of private utilities across the nation could be measured, so the TVA as a comprehensive regional planning program was seen as an exemplar for other great river valley programs. Later the president would propose seven more river authorities, most notably for the Missouri and the headwaters of the Mississippi. Congress rejected all these proposals, in part because of the TVA’s internal troubles and its increasingly belligerent opponents, in part because, by 1939, Congress was more than ever in revolt against the Roosevelt administration.
So the dream of more TV As would remain only a dream. In this respect the New Deal was not, literally, even one-half or two-thirds dealt, it was only one-seventh dealt. But in its own valley, on its own terms, the TVA was a stunning act of transformational leadership, as much on the part of the people in the valley as of its Washington and Knoxville administrators.