ELEVEN
The Grapes of Wrath

STUDENTS OF HISTORY HAVE long observed the tendency of social movements to overflow their channels. Moderate reformers seize power from tired regimes and alter the traditional way of things, and then extremists wrest power from the moderates; a Robespierre succeeds a Danton; a Lenin succeeds a Kerensky. Often it is not actual suffering but the taste of better things that excites people to revolt.

Such was the danger of the early years of the New Deal. The Hoover years had been a period of social statics; the Depression seemed to have frozen people into political as well as economic inertness. Then came the golden words of a new leader, the excitement of bread and circuses, the flush of returning prosperity. Better times led to higher expectations, and higher expectations in turn to discontent as recovery faltered. America had been in a political slack water; now the tide was running strong toward new and dimly seen shores.

Riding this swift-running tide were more radical leaders with new messages for America. They sensed that millions wanted not merely economic uplift but social salvation. They estimated correctly. In a time of vast change and ferment many Americans yearned for leaders who could bring order out of chaos, who could regulate a seemingly hostile world. The New Deal benefits had not reached all these people, nor had even Roosevelt himself. Sharecroppers, old people, hired hands, young jobless college graduates, steel puddlers working three months a year, migratory farm laborers—millions of these were hardly touched by NRA or AAA. Many of them, especially in rural areas, were beyond Roosevelt’s reach; they had no radios to hear his voice, no newspapers to see his face; they belonged to no organized groups.

Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and in the ferment of the early 1930’s these new leaders were busy breeding and capturing discontent. Their main technique was to offer simple, concrete solutions to people bored and confused by the complexities of the New Deal, and to do so by a direct, dramatic pitch. Their appeal was personal rather than formal, mystical rather than rational. With their mass demonstrations, flags, slogans, and panaceas, they unconsciously followed Hitler’s advice to “burn into the little man’s soul the proud conviction that though a little worm he is nevertheless part of a great dragon.”

The high point in these currents of the great tide came in 1935. It was in this year that Roosevelt came face to face with the men who were turning against the administration and who were hoping to build new citadels of power from the ashes of the New Deal.

THE LITTLE FOXES

On a hot June day early in Roosevelt’s first term a young man with a snub nose, dimpled chin, and wavy hair, strode into the office of the President of the United States. He was Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana, and he was in a huff. After a few pleasantries he went straight to the point. Huey P. Long, he proclaimed, had swung the nomination to Roosevelt at Chicago. And he had supported the administration’s program. But what had Roosevelt done for him? Nothing. Patronage had gone to the Senator’s enemies in Louisiana, and the President had kept on some of Huey’s old enemies in the administration.

Perched on top of Long’s red hair was a sailor straw hat with a bright-colored band, and there it stayed during the interview, except when the Senator whipped it off and tapped it against the President’s knee to drive home his complaints. This open defiance of presidential amenities upset Farley, who was sitting by, and put McIntyre, who was lurking by the door, into a teeth-clenching rage. But Roosevelt, leaning back in his chair, did not seem to mind a bit. The big smile on his face never left. He answered Long’s arguments pleasantly but firmly. He took no blame for the past, made no promises for the future.

After a few minutes the Senator admitted defeat. He took his hat off and kept it off; shortly afterward he made his departure. Outside the White House he said to Farley: “What the hell is the use of coming down to see this fellow? I can’t win any decision over him.” It was the last meeting between Roosevelt and Long. Within a few months the Louisianian had started total war against the administration.

Long had emerged from a background almost the antithesis of Roosevelt’s. Winn Parish in northern Louisiana, where he had been born in a log cabin in 1893, was a land of scrawny cattle, harvests, and people, a spawning ground of political protest. Vocal and energetic from the start, Huey ran away at ten, tried his hand at auctioneering, helping in a printer’s office, peddling books, selling a cooking compound and medicines for “women’s sickness,” went through the three-year law course at Tulane in eight months, and got a special examination from a Louisiana court to enter the bar at twenty-one. He “came out of that courtroom running for office.”

June 84, 1934, C. K. Berryman, Washington Star

Run for office he did—and much more. Unlike most Louisiana politicians, Huey tried fresh techniques. He attacked the big corporations and seemed to mean it, he outfought the political old guard, and he came through on his promises of free schoolbooks, better roads and hospitals, more public works. He won the governorship in 1928 after a cyclonic campaign, stood off a move to impeach him, and crushed the opposition. His “theory of democracy” was simple. “A leader gets up a program and then he goes out and explains it, patiently and more patiently, until they get it,” he said. And if he wins office, “he don’t tolerate no opposition from the old-gang politicians, the legislatures, the courts, the corporations or anybody.” Huey didn’t, and in a few years he made Louisiana his fiefdom.

With his base increasingly secure, Huey roamed into wider fields. Elected Senator in 1930, he had found the perfect national forum. In the Senate, he thumped august senatorial backs, lambasted “Prince Franklin, Knight of the Nourmahal” [a yacht owned by Vincent Astor that Roosevelt occasionally used], “Lord Corn Wallace,” “Chicago Chinch Bug” Ickes, accused Farley of profiteering, and turned the Senate Office Building into national headquarters for his Share-Our-Wealth movement. If the means were vague, the goals were definite and glowing: free homesteads and education, cheap food, veterans bonuses, a limitation of fortunes, a minimum annual income of two thousand dollars. Every man a king, and Huey the kingfish.

Bragging that he would go to the White House in 1936, or at the latest in 1940, Long cast about for allies, and other leaders loomed as possible auxiliaries of the Louisianian. One of these was Father Coughlin, of Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb. A burly young man with a smooth face and a smoother tongue, Coughlin had had the wit late in the ‘twenties to turn to his natural instrument, the radio. He had met with phenomenal success. One of his denunciations of “Hoover prosperity” had brought a million letters; he averaged eighty thousand a week. When his 150 assistants opened the mail, money would tumble out—up to half a million dollars a year, it was said.

For a time Coughlin strongly supported Roosevelt. “The New Deal is Christ’s Deal,” he proclaimed, and the two men had exchanged friendly letters. When Coughlin solicited a naval appointment for a priest in September 1934, the President interceded with the Navy Department. But Coughlin’s program went far beyond Roosevelt’s. He wanted currency inflation, a “living annual wage,” nationalization of banking, currency, and national resources. His relations with Roosevelt suddenly turned cold in 1934, perhaps because his leading backer was discovered by the administration to be a big operator in foreign exchange. The voice from the Shrine of the Little Flower, first low and solemn, then keening high and plaintive, was soon lumping Roosevelt with the “godless capitalists, the Jews, communists, international bankers, and plutocrats.”

Meanwhile a third figure loomed on the western horizon—a lean, bespectacled oldster named Dr. Francis E. Townsend. A former city health officer, almost destitute himself, Townsend had absorbed some of the economic panaceas floating around California. He was brooding over the plight of himself and his generation when—so the story went—he looked out his bathroom window one morning and saw three old women rummaging in a garbage pail for scraps to eat. From that moment the old man’s crusade was on. He came up with a plan that—to old people at least—was spine-tingling in its sweep and simplicity. Everyone sixty or over would get a monthly pension of two hundred dollars provided—and what a wonderful proviso it was—that he spent his money within thirty days. Financed by a “transactions tax” the vast forced spending would invigorate the whole economy.

The truth about Townsend soon blended inseparably with legend, but the context of the movement was clear. America’s population was aging; the old rural family sheltering aunts and uncles and grandparents was declining; the self-sufficient community was disappearing. Etched deep on the faces of the old people who crowded around the doctor was the pitiless story of a generation: complicated machines that had thrown them out of factories, new routines that had eluded them, perhaps a long trek westward to the end of the line—and finally the Great Depression, casually breaking several million old people on the economic wheel.

The Townsend movement mushroomed with startling speed. In September 1933—seven months after Roosevelt’s New Deal started—the doctor sent his plan to a local newspaper; within a year a thousand or more Townsend clubs were organized. Another thousand or so were set up in early 1935. As the New Deal honeymoon waned the cause seemed to be gaining momentum. Striking deep roots in the subsoil of discontent, it had the indispensable material for a protest movement: a leader who symbolized the cause; a strongly religious twist to the appeal; a concrete program directly related to old people’s needs and indigenous to the “American way of life,” scorning radical and “unChristian” methods.

Roosevelt’s friends were alarmed by the burgeoning power of the agitators. Report after report came to the White House of huge mass meetings aroused by anti-Roosevelt speeches. There was talk, Colonel House warned the President, that Long could do to him what Theodore Roosevelt had done to Taft in 1912. Even Howe got worried after Dan Tobin of the teamsters union reported that members—“decent and honest fellows” too—were asking if they should form Share-Our-Wealth clubs. Stanley High, a White House assistant, returned from the West with gloomy reports in August 1935. The Townsend movement was vital and fast-moving, he warned the White House; it was his guess that the biggest mistake in 1936 would be made by those who thought Townsend could be laughed off.

Guesswork was one thing; factual reports something else. Alarmed by Long’s activities, Farley asked the National Democratic Committee’s statistician, Emil Hurja, to make a secret poll of Long’s national strength. Hurja’s findings were disquieting. The Kingfish had drawn from the President sizable sections of his 1932 vote. Long’s strength was not restricted to Louisiana and a few nearby states; he had surprising support across the nation—enough, possibly, to tip the balance toward Republicans in 1936 elections. To make matters worse, he was openly threatening to “get” some of his foes in the Senate. This threat had a sharp edge to it. In 1932 Long had invaded Arkansas in a whirlwind, circus-like campaign to help Hattie Caraway succeed to her late husband’s Senate seat—“one poor little widow woman against six big-bellied bullies,” he said—and Hattie had won more votes than her six opponents combined.

How would Roosevelt respond to the little foxes? He followed closely the activities of Long & Co., but he was not unduly alarmed. He seemed more concerned that the Republicans—especially progressive Republicans like La Follette and Nye—might fish in troubled waters, resulting in both a progressive Republican ticket and a Long ticket in 1936. “There is no question that it is all a dangerous situation,” the President wrote House, “but when it comes to Show-down these fellows cannot all lie in the same bed and will fight among themselves with almost absolute certainty.”

Roosevelt quickly discerned a critical weakness of the protest movements: their timing. It was better, he wrote House, to have the “free side-show” in 1935 than the next year, when the main performance would start. When Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson’s biographer, urged him in March 1935 to keep before the country a vision of high moral purpose, Roosevelt demurred. Public psychology, he said, “cannot, because of human weakness, be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note in the scale.” Wilson had stirred moral convictions, but he had lacked T.R.’s power to arouse people to enthusiasm over specific events.

“There is another thought which is involved in continuous leadership,” the President went on. People “tire of seeing the same name day after day in the important headlines of the papers, and the same voice night after night over the radio. For example, if since last November I had tried to keep up the pace of 1933 and 1934, the inevitable histrionics of the new actors, Long and Coughlin and Johnson, would have turned the eyes of the audience away from the main drama itself!” But Roosevelt agreed that the time would come for a “new stimulation of united American action,” and he would be ready.

But that time was not yet. Roosevelt’s way of dealing with rival leaders meanwhile was not to try to steal their ideological thunder, but to outmaneuver them in some close and tricky infighting.

His attack against Long was of this order. Patronage was doled out to the enemies of the Kingfish in Louisiana, and his supporters holding non-civil service jobs were fired. Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi politician who had been given a job by the administration, was assigned the task of warding off Long’s forays against neighboring senators. In August 1935, after an administration friend had won a primary election in Mississippi, Bilbo wired Roosevelt that the first treatment had been administered “that madman Huey Long” and more would follow. “I am watching your smoke,” Roosevelt answered enthusiastically. Federal agents roamed Louisiana checking the financial affairs of Long and his gang.

Coughlin, too, felt the stiletto rather than the rapier. The last thing Roosevelt wanted was a head-on encounter with the priest; he was upset when cabinet members spoke up against Coughlin. The President preferred to work under cover against the priest through prominent Catholics such as Frank Murphy, ex-mayor of Detroit, and administration friends in the hierarchy and in Catholic laymen’s organizations. An elaborate study was submitted to Roosevelt of Coughlin’s broadcasting network, and Farley checked on postal receipts at the Royal Oak post office as a measure of the response to one of the priest’s appeals for funds. The White House had a hopeful report from Cardinal O’Connell in Boston that the Father was to be called to Rome to head the American College there, but nothing came of this.

If much of this maneuvering was ineffective, Roosevelt did not seem to be concerned. He could wait. To many of the inner circle during the early months of 1935, however, the administration seemed to be drifting and the President losing ground politically.

LABOR: NEW MILLIONS AND NEW LEADERS

On the labor front, too, the New Deal unleashed surging and dynamic forces. Probably Roosevelt never fully understood these new forces or the new leaders they lifted to power. Certainly he had little conscious role in bringing about social and legislative changes that were to recast radically the structure of political power in the 1930’s.

The Depression had sapped the morale and strength of organized labor. Union membership, which had slowly fallen off during the 1920’s, sank deep after 1930 as workers lost jobs and as a huge reservoir of unemployed made the strike a feeble and often suicidal weapon. The more cautious union leaders tried to batten down the hatches as the industrial storms blew. Sporadic strikes of desperation swept bituminous coal and textile centers, but they were poorly organized and usually ebbed away amid shootings, arrests, terrorism, aimless destruction. By early March 1933 the relative strength of organized labor was about what it had been a quarter-century before.

Quite unwittingly the new President acted as midwife in the rebirth of labor action. The Rooseveltian militance and exuberance of the Hundred Days aroused workers just as they aroused the rest of the population. But even more decisive was a little provision in the NRA act, Section 7a, which provided that “employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives.…” Neither Roosevelt nor Miss Perkins had much to do with this provision. Framed mainly by congressmen and labor leaders, it was simply part of a bargain under which labor joined the NRA’s great “concert of interests.” Moreover, the provision opened up a Pandora’s box of complexity and ambiguity; lawyers argued endlessly over its interpretation.

But labor leaders made it simple enough. “To hell with the legal talk,” they told their organizers, PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT WANTS YOU TO JOIN THE UNION, proclaimed posters that John L. Lewis plastered by the thousands throughout the mining area. Unionism, labor organizers shouted, was now good Americanism. As business improved during 1933, workers flocked into unions—into the United Mine Workers, into David Dubinsky’s International Ladies Garment Workers Union, into Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers, into the United Textile Workers Union, tens of thousands more into embryonic rubber, steel, auto, aluminum, cement, metal-mining unions.

There was a virtual uprising of workers for union membership, incredulous AFL leaders reported. Workers held mass meetings and sent word they wanted to be organized.

With growing unionism came a rash of strikes. Hackies in New York City, shipyard mechanics in New Jersey, aluminum workers in Pennsylvania, Milwaukee streetcar men, Butte copper miners, California fruit pickers, grocery clerks, newspapermen, furriers, teamsters, lumberjacks left their work. More workers struck in the summer of 1933 than in the whole period of 1930 and 1931. And the strike wave surged upward during 1934 and 1935. Symptomatic of the general unrest was the longshoremen’s strike on the West Coast which spread to milk-wagon drivers, carpenters, and other workers. So alarmed were Secretaries Hull and Cummings by this situation—the President was on a cruise—that Miss Perkins found them gravely discussing whether or not this was a “general strike” as defined in an article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

When the strikes inundated the NRA mediation machinery, Roosevelt established a National Labor Board under his old friend Senator Robert Wagner of New York. Successful at first, the board collapsed in the face of employer intransigence in late 1933 and early 1934. Wagner now saw the need for a permanent law outside the NRA structure, establishing legal sanction for collective bargaining through unions of workers’ own choosing. With no help from the President, who in 1934 was still keeping his chips on the NRA partnership method, the New York Senator, Secretary of Labor Perkins, and a group of administration labor experts hammered out a bill that would give Section 7a force and precision. This bill ran head on into opposition from employers and the press and vacillation in the White House. Finally, Roosevelt backed a compromise resolution that went through Congress with bipartisan support and under which the President set up a temporary National Labor Relations Board. The new law was fuzzy on major points. Roosevelt still had no collective bargaining policy; he was still floundering from crisis to crisis.

And more crises were building up. The events of 1933 and 1934 had released labor forces that were putting the old machinery of the labor movement under severe strain. Spunky young leaders were emerging in great industrial centers—men who had left assembly lines only a few months back to form unions, lead strikes, organize picket lines, cope with bosses, scabs, cops, judges. Eager to organize the new millions, the AFL was still dominated by leaders of craft-type unions who had an old and tested way of recruiting members—put them into “federal” unions, rigidly controlled by the AFL labor chiefs, and keep them in these recruiting stations until they could be parceled out, trade by trade and craft by craft, to the Blacksmiths, the Carpenters, the Electricians, the Pipe Fitters, the Sheet Metal Workers, and a score of other craft unions.

Confronting giant, nationwide, integrated industrial empires like General Motors, United States Steel, Goodyear, and Du Pont, the grass-roots leaders saw that this slicing-up process meant disunity and weakness. Ready to back them up was a minority group of AFL leaders: Lewis, Murray, Hillman, Dubinsky, and a dozen others. What part craft versus industrial unionism, labor statesmanship, personal ambition, and ancient grudges played in the ensuing infighting was obscured in the dust and clamor of battle, but the Federation was soon shaken to its foundations. In the fall of 1935 Lewis and his followers set up the Committee for Industrial Organization.

“Dear Sir and Brother,” Lewis wrote Green on November 23, 1935, “Effective this date I resign as vice-president of the American Federation of Labor.” A new dimension was being added to the shape of American power.

And where was Roosevelt in all this? His part was not much more than that of an onlooker. The fact was that internal politics of the unions did not interest him. The political implications of a vastly expanded labor movement solidly grounded in the millions of workers in the great mass-production industries seemed to escape him.

And yet vital questions and possibilities were hidden in the complexities of government policy toward collective bargaining and in the skirmishes of union chiefs. They were questions and possibilities of economic and political power. Section 7a put the weight of government behind unions. The question now was the kind of union. Much depended on governmental policy concerning questions like the nature of the bargaining unit, the method of election, craft versus industrial representation, the definition of company unions. When, for example, Roosevelt in March 1934 threw his influence behind a kind of proportional representation for auto workers, he weakened the solidarity and power of the workers against management. When labor officials backed company-wide unions and representation based on majority-rule elections, they were building up the power of mass industrial unions.

Humdrum matters, but important. John L. Lewis was shrewd enough to understand the implications for the future. “Isn’t it right,” he asked the 1935 convention of the AFL in his growling, thundering way, “that we should contribute something of our own strength, our own knowledge, our own influence toward those less fortunately situated? … If we help them and they grow strong, in turn we will be the beneficiaries of their changed status and their strength.… And whereas today the craft unions may be able to stand upon their own feet, and like mighty oaks before the gale, defy the lightning, the day may come when this changed scheme of things—and things are rapidly changing now—when these organizations will not be able to withstand the lightning and the gale.” Lewis was calling for a deliberate policy of broadening the labor movement in order to deepen the economic strength of a labor coalition.

If Roosevelt failed to see the potentialities of an enlarged labor movement for the political coalition behind the New Deal, the reason lay in part in his attitude toward labor. He looked on labor from the viewpoint of a patron and benefactor, not as a political leader building up the labor flank of future political armies. He was concerned about their wages, hours, and conditions; he saw them as people with concrete troubles. It is significant that when he talked with reporters about a visit auto workers had paid him, he said nothing about the union situation in this vital industry but quoted line by line his conversation with the men about their problem of making ten dollars a day but working only sixty-five days a year.

The supreme test of Roosevelt’s leadership in this area was his handling of the Wagner Act. This was the most radical legislation passed during the New Deal, in the sense that it altered fundamentally the nation’s politics by vesting massive economic and political power in organized labor. Unlike much of Roosevelt’s reform and relief program, the act cut through the heart of existing labor-management relations. It had an essential part in building powerful unions that in turn would furnish votes, money, and organization to future liberal coalitions.

Yet for months Roosevelt was cool to the Wagner bill; he threw his weight behind the measure only at the last moment, when it was due to pass anyway. He long showed a special indifference, even obtuseness, to the cardinal question of employee representation. In May 1934 he told reporters with some irritation that the workers could choose as representatives whomever they wished—including the Ahkoond of Swat, or the Royal Geographic Society, or a union, or the Crown Prince of Siam. He failed to see that the essence of the problem was whether or not workers could still be represented by company unions and by a variety of minority and craft spokesmen whose disunity would weaken the workers in dealing with employers and in forging a new political arm.

When Wagner went ahead and introduced his National Labor Relations bill into Congress in February 1935, he not only got no help or encouragement from the President, but it was all he could do to stop Roosevelt from lining up with Senators Robinson and Harrison in the latter’s efforts to stall the bill to death. Questioned in press conferences, Roosevelt was invariably cool or evasive. Almost singlehanded Wagner shaped political strategy, won grudging acceptance of the bill from the AFL old guard, fought the bill through the Senate against a hostile press and indifferent leadership. The bill passed the Senate, 63-12, on May 16, 1935.

Eleven days later the Supreme Court invalidated the Recovery Act, including whatever legal support the act had given unionization. It might be logically supposed that it was this action, knocking the props from under the President’s collective bargaining policy, that forced him into Wagner’s camp. But no; on May 24, three days before the court decision, Roosevelt came out for the bill. Why? The explanation lies largely in his simple, pragmatic reaction to the immediate situation. The bill’s top-heavy majority in the Senate made House passage seem certain. By coming out for the bill Roosevelt could influence some important provisions still open, and he could wangle his way out of what might be called an administration defeat. He may have been influenced, too, by the fact that Chamber of Commerce leaders, who had been generally sympathetic to his program, openly broke with him early in May. The Supreme Court decision simply reinforced a decision already made.

With typical Rooseveltian agility, he dropped his weight heavily on the scales, once he had decided to jump. By June the Wagner measure was a “must bill.” Roosevelt helped push the bill over the hurdles in the House; he ignored the frantic entreaties of businessmen to stop the measure. After the bill passed the House without a roll call, the President congratulated Chairman Connery of the House Labor Committee, adding, “It is a tremendous step forward.”

In this curious way Roosevelt and labor first became partners.

LEFT! RIGHT! LEFT!

Roosevelt’s sudden reversal on the Wagner Act was symptomatic of his policy-making during 1935. The first session of the Seventy-fourth Congress stands as one of the strangest examples of presidential leadership and congressional followership in modern times. That session had passed several mild New Deal measures and was apparently coming to an end when it suddenly showed a burst of energy and enacted, during the hot summer of 1935, some of the most significant measures of Roosevelt’s first term. But if the President’s course seemed erratic, the explanation was clear. He was picking his way, step by step, among great pressures, now forced left and now right as he faced specific problems, always moving toward a goal that was fixed only generally in his mind.

The President’s State of the Union speech to Congress in January 1935 had given little foretaste of the stormy days ahead. Despite references to the need for more social justice, it was moderate in tone and called for a rather limited program. “We can, if we will,” said the President, “make 1935 a genuine period of good feeling, sustained by a sense of purposeful progress.” He told the receptive legislators that he was ready to submit a broad security program, embracing natural resources, unemployment insurance, old-age insurance, and better homes. He promised an extensive new program of public works and work relief. He mentioned briefly other needed measures such as extending the NRA and improving taxation “forms and methods.” The New Deal, evidently, was to be clarified, improved, and consolidated, rather than extensively broadened.

This attempt by the President to follow a wobbling way between the left and right threatened for months to mire his program in a legislative swamp. The via media still would not work.

The huge work relief bill sharply etched the difficulties of the middle way. “The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief,” the President told Congress. He was not willing that the vitality of the people should be further sapped by handing out cash or market baskets or by giving a few hours’ work cutting grass or raking leaves. The most exciting thing about the bill was Roosevelt’s request for $4,880,000,000—a sensational sum for peacetime—but this sum was actually about halfway between the nine billions urged by progressives in the Senate and the small “dole” favored by some conservative legislators. Roosevelt also took the precaution of having the director of procurement, rather than the controversial figures Ickes and Hopkins (who would administer it), present the bill to the House Committee.

Steered firmly by the House leaders, the bill went through the lower chamber with relative ease. In the Senate the story was different. With unlimited debate at their disposal, groups on the right and left ripped into the bill. The goal of the conservatives was simple: to reduce the appropriation and turn the bill into poor relief. The labor bloc wished to expand the bill’s coverage, but, above all, they hoped to write in a provision that labor would be given the prevailing wage paid by private employers in the area. This provision the President flatly opposed; he preferred a “security wage” of perhaps fifty dollars a month, partly to spread relief farther, partly to appease private employers’ fears of wage competition. Lining up first with the left and then with the right were inflationists, Senators mainly concerned with converting the program into a pork barrel that they could open up back home, and adventurers like Long. Muddying the waters further were Ickes and Hopkins as they enlisted legislators to back their own favorite provisions.

Joining in a policy of opportunism, these disparate groups pushed a prevailing wage amendment through by one vote. Roosevelt’s response was to have the resolution temporarily killed by being sent back to committee. The President was finding his course hard going. Ickes felt that he was dispirited, looking tired, and lacking his usual fighting vigor and buoyancy. In the Senate, Long was cock of the walk. While the White House tried to find a compromise on the prevailing wage, the Kingfish taunted: “I see by the newspapers that some votes are being switched on the prevailing wage amendment. I resent anyone calling on anybody for a trade without calling on me first. … I might cut the price a little bit.” He rambled on. “I am a dyed-in-the-wool party man. I do not know just what party I am in right now, but I am for the party.”

By compromising with the liberal-labor bloc the administration was finally able to stave off crippling amendments and push the bill through. Passage was due less to Roosevelt—who was cruising on the Nourmahal during the latter stages and complaining that the Senate was a “headache” and the whole situation “too childish for grownups”—than to administration leaders on the Hill and to the legislators’ willingness to compromise on certain issues by leaving them to the President. Roosevelt had to accept some losses: most notably a provision requiring senatorial confirmation for employees under the measure who earned more than $5,000 a year.

By early April when the relief bill passed, Roosevelt had only this victory in three months. He had appealed to the Senate to ratify United States adherence to the World Court, but the effort had failed amid a deluge of hostile telegrams, many of them stirred up by Coughlin. His social security bill, which would commit the nation to a program of assisting the jobless and the poor through federal and state action, was floundering between the same forces that had almost ground the relief bill to death: the liberals were sorely disappointed by its limited coverage and by the reliance it put on state participation; the conservatives thought it went too far. A veterans’ bonus bill had passed the House with more than enough votes to override the expected presidential veto.

Never had Roosevelt been so squeezed among opposing political forces as during the spring of 1935. Spokesmen of the United States Chamber of Commerce sharply attacked the administration. Meeting with the President in mid-May, progressive senators La Follette, Wheeler, Norris, and Johnson, backed up by Ickes and Wallace, urged him to assert the leadership that the country, they said, was demanding. Roosevelt’s old adviser Felix Frankfurter reported that Justice Louis Brandeis had sent word that it was the eleventh hour. La Follette reminded the President that Theodore Roosevelt had taken open issue with members of his own party.

Roosevelt indicated to the progressives that he would take a firmer stand. But despite the pressure from left and right, and from the agitators of discontent, he was not yet ready to jettison the middle way. He was still pinning his hopes on an extension of NRA for two years. The NRA was not Little Orphan Annie, he told reporters, but “a very live young lady” and he expected the two-year extension to go through.

Then, late in May, came the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court invalidating the NRA, mainly on the grounds that Congress had exercised power beyond the scope of the interstate commerce clause and had delegated too much of this power outside its own reach. It was a jolting blow to the heart of Roosevelt’s middle way.

For four days the President was silent, while the country waited expectantly. Then, on May 31, he gave his answer in a carefully staged performance. As the reporters trooped up to his desk, they saw an open copy of the high court’s opinion on one side, and on the other a dozen or more telegrams. Eleanor Roosevelt was there, knitting on a blue sock. The President leaned back in his chair, lighted a cigarette, jestingly asked, as he so often did, whether the reporters had any news. Did he care to comment on the NRA? a reporter asked.

“Well, Steve, if you insist. That’s an awful thing to put up to a fellow at this hour of the morning just out of bed.” But the President was eager to talk. And talk he did, for almost an hour and a half.

His monologue was not that of a liberal outraged by a tory court. It was a long dissenting opinion by a man who had been following a moderate course helping and mediating among businessmen, workers, and farmers alike, and now to his surprise finds the props knocked from under him. One by one he quoted from the pile of telegrams. These “pathetic appeals,” as he called them, came not from unemployed workers or from desperate farmers but from businessmen—drugstore proprietors in Indiana, a candy seller in Massachusetts, a Georgia businessman, a large department store owner, a cigar store operator. Pushing the telegrams aside, the President paused dramatically. What were the implications of the decision? It simply made impossible national action, collective action, the great partnership. Clearly he was attacking the decision not because it was conservative or antilabor but because it thwarted action by the national government to help all groups, including business.

Again and again the President insisted it was not a partisan issue. Where to go next? “Don’t call it right or left; that is just first-year high school language, just about. It is not right or left.…” Then he slashed at the Court again. A “horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce.” And he let the reporters quote that phrase. FDR—‘HORSE-AND-BUGGY DECISION’ shouted next day from front pages across the nation. Most people took this remark figuratively as a New Dealer’s attack on conservative judges. Actually Roosevelt was speaking literally—he was dissenting with judges who thought that national problems could be solved by forty-eight separate states. Pressed by reporters as to how he would cope with the effect of the decision, the President said, “We haven’t got to that, yet.”

Then began the second Hundred Days.

Congress, which had been idling for weeks and had come to a standstill after the court decision, was galvanized into action. Roosevelt threw himself into the legislative battle. No longer was he squeamish about putting the lash to congressional flanks. Now he was bluntly telling congressional leaders that certain bills must be passed. Administration contact men ranged amid the legislative rank and file, applying pressure. Late in the afternoon they would report back to the President. When they mentioned a balking congressman, the big hand would move instantly to the telephone; in a few moments the President would have the congressman on the wire, coaxing him, commanding him, negotiating with him. To scores of others Roosevelt dictated one- or two-sentence chits asking for action. He and his lieutenants, working late into the night, acting in close concert with friendly leaders on Capitol Hill, stayed one or two jumps ahead of the divided opposition. Congressmen complained, balked, dragged their heels, but in the end they acted.

The Wagner Labor Relations Act went through with a rush before the end of June, and the President signed it enthusiastically. The Social Security Act was passed, also by heavy majorities. Banking and Tennessee Valley legislation were strengthened. The AAA was modified in an attempt to protect it against judicial veto. The holding company bill, which was designed to curb the power of giant utility holding companies over their operating subsidiaries, and which Roosevelt had been urging since January, went through under intensified administration pressure. And a controversial tax bill became law despite intense opposition from business and grumbling among congressmen that the President was pushing them too hard.

Nothing better showed Roosevelt’s sudden change of direction than the tax bill. He had said nothing about such a measure in his January message; his budget message had suggested that no new taxes would be needed. He had toyed with a “share-the-wealth” scheme of the Treasury’s in February, but as late as May 22 he seemed to be sticking to his January position. Unexpectedly on June 19 the President asked Congress for an inheritance tax as well as the estate tax, gift taxes to balk evasion of the inheritance tax, stepped-up income taxes on “very great individual incomes,” and a corporation income tax graduated according to the size of corporations, with a dividend tax to prevent evasion. Leaving Congress “tired, sick, and sore, and in confusion,” as one Senator said, the President then departed for the Yale-Harvard boat races.

What had happened? Had the President turned left?

Viewed in retrospect, Roosevelt’s course seemed to many a sudden and massive shift leftward, away from the via media of the first two years to a commanding position on the left. From such a view it was an easy step to the further assumption that Roosevelt had shifted left to meet the rising hurricanes among labor, farmers, Long, Coughlin, Townsend & Co. The trouble with this theory is that it does not fit the way Roosevelt actually behaved. His reaction to the hurricanes set off by agitators of discontent was to outmaneuver the leaders and to give way a bit to the blast, not to steal the ideological thunder of the left. He did not exploit the potentialities of encouraging and allying himself with the new millions of labor.

What did happen was the convergence of a number of trends and episodes at a crucial point—June 1935—that left Roosevelt in the posture of a radical. The Supreme Court demolished the main institutional apparatus of the middle way by invalidating NRA. In filling this void, Roosevelt salvaged 7a (in the form of the Wagner Act) and other NRA provisions that had been concessions to the left. The Court’s decision made impossible the resurrection of the code features that had been the NRA’s attraction for certain business and industrial groups. The result of this situation was that merely carrying on prolabor elements of the NRA meant a leftward shift.

This was one reason for Roosevelt’s new posture; another was the practical effect of dealing with Congress. Following a middle way between the progressive and conservative factions had not been as easy in 1935 as it had been earlier. For one thing, Congress had shifted leftward in interest and ideology after the November 1934 election. In the early months of 1935 Roosevelt’s program had been bombarded from right and left, and narrowly escaped destruction. The exigencies of congressional politics pulled him to a more liberal program, and it was significant that his new position, harmonizing more smoothly with the majority in Congress on the left, resulted in an even more important array of measures than those of the first Hundred Days.

APPLYING THE PRESSURE, May 1, 1935, C. H. Sykes, Philadelphia Public Ledger

But the main reason for the new posture was the cumulative impact of the attacks from the right. He had been following a middle way; “as he looked back on it all,” recalled Moley, who was watching him closely during this period, “he was, like Clive, amazed at his own moderation.” The undercover attacks of business, the criticism that filled most of the press, the open desertion of big businessmen as symbolized in the Liberty League and smaller businessmen as represented in the Chamber of Commerce, the drifting away of conservative advisers like Moley—all these played their part. The desertion of the right, especially in the NRA decision, automatically helped shift Roosevelt to the left.

The theory that Roosevelt executed a swing left for ideological reasons as a result only of the NRA decision runs hard up against other strands of Roosevelt’s development. His program had always embraced liberal measures as well as orthodox ones. Social security had long been in the works—Roosevelt in 1930 had been the first leading politician to advocate unemployment insurance—and it was put off to 1935 mainly because of administrative and drafting difficulties. The President urged the holding company bill throughout the session. He lined up for the Wagner Act before the NRA decision was announced. The speech he planned to give if the Supreme Court ruled against the abrogation of the Gold Clause would, except for the Court’s 5-4 majority for the government, have precipitated a grave constitutional crisis in February 1935.

Roosevelt, in short, made no consciously planned, grandly executed deployment to the left. He was like the general of a guerrilla army whose columns, fighting blindly in the mountains through dense ravines and thickets, suddenly converge, half by plan and half by coincidence, and debouch into the plain below.

That Roosevelt had made no final ideological commitment to the left was made clear in an exchange of letters between the President and newspaper publisher Roy Howard shortly after Congress adjourned. Certain elements of business, Howard warned, had been growing more hostile to the administration, and considered the tax bill an attempt at revenge on business. They hoped for a breathing spell for industry, a recess from further experimentation. In a cordial response Roosevelt defended the tax measure and spoke for a “wise balance” in the economy. But, he added, the administration’s basic program had now reached substantial completion. The “breathing-spell” was here—“very decidedly so.” The zig had been followed by another zag.

Possibly Roosevelt really meant what he wrote to Howard. But events have ways of committing leaders to new positions. The great legislative victories of 1935 had unloosed forces that were to carry Roosevelt further from the middle way toward partisanship and party leadership. The second Hundred Days pointed the way toward the triumph of 1936—and toward the defeats that lay beyond.