IN MOST SOCIETIES, PEOPLE’S love for their leaders is strongly mixed with hatred and fear. Certain tribes set off a time each year for the throwing of dung at their chiefs. In America, as Mr. Dooley once remarked, people build their triumphal arches out of brick so that they will have something handy to throw at the hero when he comes through. As economic conditions deteriorated during early 1938, so did Roosevelt’s popularity. By the summer months of that year barely half the people questioned in a nationwide survey said that they would vote for Roosevelt if they were going to the polls at that time.
The rancor among sections of the rich was sharper and uglier than ever. The President seemed to be hated more bitterly in conservative quarters than any American progressive since Bryan. A corporation lawyer openly solicited pledges in Wall Street for a large fund to be presented to Roosevelt on condition he resign within five months.
Any trouble in the Roosevelt family was fair game for the Roosevelt haters. During his early presidential years his sons got into the usual scrapes at school—especially traffic offenses—and these were duly inflated in the press. A highly publicized article in the Saturday Evening Post accused James of exploiting his family connection in writing insurance. Several actual or impending divorces in the family got full attention, especially in the gossip columns. While the father did what he could to bring about reconciliations, he did not expect his children to subordinate their private lives to his public life. He said little about these problems except in the immediate family circle, but the attacks on his offspring—and through them on him—hurt. They must have hurt all the more because he knew that for the last ten years he had had little time to devote to family affairs and problems.
Roosevelt stories made their rounds of country club and dinner party; one of the more ingenious was about the philatelist who took some of his most prized stamps to the White House to show them to the President, how Roosevelt filched several of the choicest when his guest was not looking, how Mrs. Roosevelt summoned the collector to a New York hotel a week later and quietly paid him off. Fashionable men and women, fastidious about everything except their obsession with the man in the White House, talked on and on about his mind, his legs, his morals, and the morals of his family.
All this Roosevelt could write off—indeed, had long before written off. But the drop in his popularity among other classes was a different matter. With his acute sensitivity to shifts in attitudes, he could not ignore the fateful parallel between 1938 and the Hoover years. Roosevelt in 1938 was losing popular support not only among the prosperous but to an even greater extent among the middle- and lower-income groups. The Supreme Court fight and the Black appointment had turned people against the New Deal—but not nearly so much as had the Roosevelt recession.
But how far had this desertion gone? The decisive fact of 1938 was that most people thought Roosevelt had lost popular favor to a greater extent than he really had. His actual drop between early 1936 and late 1938 in the public polls was a matter of a few percentage points. Even at the lowest point of his popularity in 1938 he commanded the support of a bare majority of the people—and a majority that was probably a trifle larger than during certain periods of the first term. The difference was that during the first term Roosevelt always gave the impression of popularity, while in 1938 that impression no longer existed.
The popular attitude toward Roosevelt was marked by a deep ambivalence. On the one hand, almost everyone liked him as a person. Asked, “On the whole, do you like or dislike his personality?” eight out of ten Americans in the spring of 1938 answered “like” to only one who answered “dislike.” Negroes, the poor generally, labor, the unemployed were enthusiastically for Roosevelt the person. The Southwest as a section delivered a resounding 98 per cent for him, and other sections were not far behind. Most remarkable of all, not a single occupation group—not executives, nor professional people, nor proprietors—“voted” for the presidential personality by less than three-quarters of that group.
Reports from journalists squared with the findings of the pollsters. “They love Roosevelt,” reported liberal journalist Richard Neuberger from the Northwest after talking with Idaho ranchers, Seattle streetcar motormen, a lumberjack in Coeur d’Alene, a Union Pacific brakeman, a Portland electrician, and others. Whatever the objections to the New Deal, Neuberger found, people liked Roosevelt because they believed that he was doing things for them. Many referred to him as “our President,” and as long as he remained “our President,” concluded Neuberger, Roosevelt would continue to be the dominant influence in the nation’s politics.
But Roosevelt’s general economic objectives, his methods of achieving these objectives, his advisers, many of his policies—these were different matters. Fewer than half of those polled in the spring of 1938 favored Roosevelt’s economic goals; more than half were opposed, doubtful, or uninformed. More people disliked his “methods” than liked them. Of five major economic groups—Negroes, poor, lower middle, upper middle, and prosperous—all but the first two registered majorities against the President’s methods.
Running through this opposition was a streak of fear of Roosevelt’s apparent political power. As an abstract matter a large section of the people believed that the President of the United States should have less authority. About half of those with opinions said that Roosevelt himself had too much power, and about one-quarter of those who approved his economic objectives shared this alarm. The worry over presidential power extended to all economic classes; although tending to parallel general class attitudes toward Roosevelt and his policies, it was somewhat marked among the lower middle class.
The state of public opinion in the spring of 1938 posed a dilemma for the President. His great strength lay in his own political personality, in the magic spell that he could still cast over the voters. His weakness lay in the anxiety of millions over his seemingly great political power—an anxiety like that of a wife who adores a gay and vibrant husband without wholly trusting his judgment or his self-control. Could he convert his personal popularity into political strength and leadership? Could he convert the majority popular support he still retained into congressional majorities necessary to consolidate and extend the New Deal? Could he maintain and even strengthen his own power without frightening further those who already feared the extent of presidential power?
By the spring of 1938 events on Capitol Hill were bringing these questions into sharp focus.
“For God’s sake,” a congressional spokesman telephoned the White House in April 1938, “don’t send us any more controversial legislation!”
Here spoke the authentic voice of Congress. Now in the sixth year of the New Deal, senators and representatives were balking at Roosevelt’s leadership as they never had before. They were tired of “must” bills, tired of crises, tired of charges of rubber-stamp Congress, tired of bustling, pushing young zealots from the White House. Most congressmen were no less fond of Roosevelt as a person in 1938 than they had been four or five years before. But like the people as a whole, they were more jealous and distrustful of his ambitions and his powers.
Despite the personal ties between Roosevelt and many congressmen, there had always been a political and psychological breach between the New Deal President and Capitol Hill. Only during the crisis days of the early New Deal had President and legislators suspended their historic conflict—a conflict artfully contrived and institutionalized by the framers of the Constitution. So, too, Congress embraced a way of life that was alien to the brisk pace, the electric atmosphere of the White House. Things moved more sedately in the soft, casual life of cloakroom and committee chamber. Signing their mail and genially chatting with one another while forensic gales lashed the air, the senators in particular embodied old ways of politics amid the marble columns and statuary of their nineteenth-century chamber.
Presiding over this legislative way of life were men who felt supremely secure in their positions of power. Still holding seats in 1938 on Capitol Hill were two senators and two representatives who had entered Congress thirty years before, when Roosevelt was still a law clerk. These four men had seen six presidents come and five presidents go, and they doubtless expected to be in Congress after Roosevelt had gone too. Perhaps two hundred members of Congress had entered the Senate or House before Roosevelt’s first inaugural. Men who had won election after election, decade after decade, had no undue fear of a president who was limited by tradition to two terms. Many congressional leaders had almost unshakeable grips on their states or districts. Perhaps they served city machines, or had ties with dominant economic interests, or had won the hearts of their constituents by indefatigable errand-running, or had built powerful political organizations of their own.
Buttressing the power of the congressional leaders were certain arrangements on the Hill. By far the most important was the seniority rule, which inexorably elevated to chairmen those in the majority party with the longest continuous service on committees. And chairmanships meant the right to call committee meetings or not to call them, the right to speed bills on their way or to pocket them, the right to a dominant voice over policy within the committee jurisdiction. These lord-proprietors, as Woodrow Wilson once called them, had built close ties with bureaucrats who catered to their constituents, and with agents for the great national organizations that maintained their headquarters in Washington. Steeped in the lore and mores of Capitol Hill, they were artistic parliamentarians who knew the shades and nuances of quorum calls, points of order, filibusters, and a score of other weapons in the arsenal of obstruction and delay.
Because of the one-party system and sluggish politics of the South it was inevitable that Southerners would accumulate seniority and hence capture important chairmanships during periods of Democratic rule. Chairing the two great fiscal committees of the Senate in 1938 were anti-New Deal Democrats: the pert, white-haired lord of Virginia politics, Carter Glass, of Appropriations, and Mississippi’s droll, plump Pat Harrison, of Commerce. Chief of Agriculture and Forestry was crusty old Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina who, when a Negro rose to preach in the 1936 convention, had stalked out, muttering “the man is black—black as melted ink.” Southerners ran many committees of the lower chamber too. Agriculture was chaired by a Texan, Banking and Currency by an Alabaman, Judiciary by a Texan, Public Lands by a Louisianian, Ways and Means by a North Carolinian.
Another reason for Southern influence in Congress lay perhaps in commitments Roosevelt seems to have made to gain his nomination in 1932. Garner’s willingness to accept the vice-presidential nomination was due in part to Roosevelt’s willingness to recognize Southern, and especially Texan, power in Congress. The most important understanding was that Rayburn would be in line for the majority leadership and later the speakership of the House. It was the President’s recognition of Rayburn’s claim that accounted in part for the desertion of the New Deal by a rival aspirant, Representative John O’Connor of New York. Roosevelt also had 1932 debts to pay to other Southerners.
To be sure, a number of key committees in both Houses were under the chairmanship of Northerners. Some of these chieftains, like Roosevelt’s old friends Wagner of Banking and Currency in the Senate, and Mary T. Norton of Labor in the House, had consistently voted for New Deal measures. But happenstance, the prides and jealousies of office, and the factionalism and sectionalism of American party politics had brought to chairmanships a number of Northerners who had turned against much of the Roosevelt New Deal: in addition to O’Connor, that bellicose New Yorker who bossed the most powerful single committee on Capitol Hill, the House Rules Committee, there were Senator Royal S. Copeland of New York, whose relations with Roosevelt had been cool for many years, and Wheeler of Montana, who had clashed with Roosevelt over the Supreme Court and by now was off the reservation.
“Who does Roosevelt think he is?” Wheeler once demanded scornfully of a White House aide. “He used to be just one of the barons. I was baron of the Northwest. Huey Long was baron of the South.” He mentioned other sectional leaders. But the President had turned against Long and now against the Senator from Montana. “He’s like a king trying to reduce the barons.”
This Congress of 1938 had little wish to repeal the New Deal. But neither did it wish to extend the New Deal in order to meet the Roosevelt challenge of the one-third ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.
Because the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936 had been a hurried measure to fill the gap left by the Supreme Court’s voiding of the original AAA, Congress moved quickly in its 1938 session to pass a new Agricultural Adjustment Act. Embracing cotton, rice, and tobacco as well as wheat and corn, this measure assigned production quotas to producers of these crops and gave money to those who planted within certain acreage allotments and who followed prescribed soil conservation methods. The government could also make loans on various farm commodities both to prevent farm prices from collapsing in the face of huge surpluses and to establish an ever-normal granary. If two-thirds of the farmers approved, artificial market control of surplus crops could be established. Providing also for freight rate studies, research in new uses for farm products, purchase of surplus farm products for persons on relief, the act set the pattern for federal regulation of agriculture for years to come.
This much for the farmer. What about the worker? Passage of a weak wages and hours bill in mid-1938 seemed to drain the cup of congressional willingness to extend the New Deal. And when it came to giving Roosevelt power to control his own executive branch, the men on Capitol Hill broke into open revolt.
By early 1938 some New Dealers had given up hope that any wage-hour bill could pass through Congress. In the regular and special sessions of 1937 the original bill had been ground to pieces between the Southern Democrats and the labor bloc. But the President was determined to press for the bill. Angry though he was about Southern desertions from the measure, he reluctantly ceded a North-South wage differential in the bill to gain Southern votes. He sounded out the AFL on the price of its support. But Roosevelt would not go too far. When Representative Martin Dies asked for further concessions for the South, the President’s patience was exhausted.
“Call up Martin Dies,” he instructed McIntyre, “and tell him that any idea of having an individual State vary a national Wages and Hours bill is not only unsound, but would destroy the effectiveness of building up a purchasing power in those sections most needing it, and the President regards it as the weakest, most dangerous proposition he has ever heard. Tell him further that if we start to legislate for the oil industry, we’ll be aiding and abetting those people who want to exempt the canners, the cheese factories, and the lumber mills, and that is completely unsound.”
But could any bill pass without “unsound” concessions? For weeks the White House and Labor Department searched for a formula. No single approach satisfied all factions. By mid-April the House Labor Committee was facing a harsh choice between an AFL bill that lacked a North-South differential and a draft backed by Southerners that empowered a five-man board to grant such a differential. Whipsawed between two blocs, members of the Labor Committee tried to stall off a decision. Roosevelt would not let them. After the Labor Committee voted down the Southerners’ draft, Chairman Mary Norton managed to hold the protesting committeemen in session until they reported out the AFL version.
Stripped of the North-South differential, the bill now ran into the hardened opposition of the Southerners dominating the Rules Committee. A discharge petition was necessary to pry the bill out of committee. But would enough congressmen sign the petition? One such effort had succeeded, but another one had failed. In this extremity the administration resorted to a crafty political maneuver.
Senator Claude Pepper, a staunch Roosevelt man, was engaged in a slam-bang race for renomination in Florida. To many observers Pepper’s chances did not seem too good, but the White House had reliable information that Pepper would win. It was reasoned that if Pepper could be induced to speak vigorously for the wage-hour bill during the campaign, his later victory would be interpreted as a test of sentiment on the bill in the South. At least $10,000 was turned over to Pepper’s campaign managers by Roosevelt’s assistants, who had got the money from a radio corporation executive on the basis of another deal.
The stratagem worked. On May 3 Pepper won a decisive victory. Three days later the discharge petition was opened for signatures. So many representatives swarmed around the “honor roll” that House proceedings were drowned out, and in less than three hours the list of signatures reached the necessary 218. On May 24, after a tumultuous session lasting twelve hours, the House passed the bill by a heavy vote. Since the House version now differed radically from the Senate draft of the previous year, the bill was in danger until the end. Southerners talked about filibuster, and Green threatened to oppose the bill if differentials were reinserted. But a conference committee skillfully worked out a set of compromises, and the bill finally became law in June.
“That’s that,” said Roosevelt with a sigh of relief as he signed the measure. His sigh was one of disappointment too. The bill had been so watered down in its long journey through Congress that it could have little impact on the national economy. And perhaps it was a sigh of prophecy. The wage-hour bill was the last of Roosevelt’s basic New Deal measures to pass Congress. During the final stages of its passage, the President had suffered a staggering defeat in Congress that was a gauge of his loss of legislative control.
The measure that occasioned this defeat was, on its face, one of the least controversial Roosevelt had ever proposed. Even more, it was designed to meet the insistent demands from business quarters that executive management be improved in the name of efficiency and economy. Previous chief executives, including Taft and Hoover, had proposed reorganization measures hardly less radical than Roosevelt’s. Formulated by a group of political scientists and public administration experts headed by Louis Brownlow, the President’s recommendations called for expanding the White House staff; strengthening his management agencies, including the substitution of a personnel director for the three-member Civil Service Commission; extending the merit system “upward, outward, and downward to cover practically all non-policy-determining posts”; setting up two new cabinet departments, Social Welfare and Public Works, and putting independent agencies under line departments; placing responsibility for accounts and transactions under the President while strengthening independent control of post-auditing under an auditor-general.
When Roosevelt first urged these changes in January 1937 they met apathy and quiet hostility in Congress. For months the proposals marked time while the Supreme Court bill held the center of the stage. Not until late in February 1938 did reorganization come before the Senate.
The times were not auspicious. Roosevelt was still floundering in the face of depression. The wage-hour bill was still splintering Congress into factions. Alarmed by the opposition’s strength, Roosevelt and a dozen of his lieutenants—Ickes, Farley, Hopkins, Corcoran, Jesse Jones, and others—threw themselves into the fray. Urgent telephone calls went to state politicos asking them to put pressure on irresolute senators; enticing patronage plums were held out; favors were bargained off. Even so, the measure barely survived a series of test votes in the Senate.
By late March a hurricane of opposition was rising from the country. Reorganization was dubbed the “dictator bill.” It was a question, proclaimed Senator Walsh of Massachusetts, “of plunging a dagger into the very heart of democracy.” It was a fight against possible Hitlerism, a columnist declared. Committees to “uphold constitutional government” showered the country with letters and advertisements. Orators at New England town meetings thundered and protested. Over a hundred Paul Reveres, mounted on horses carrying banners reading NO ONE MAN RULE, converged on Washington and clattered along Pennsylvania Avenue. Father Coughlin fulminated over the radio. It was the Supreme Court fight all over again—but perhaps even more sharp and passionate.
One day during the fight the object of all this wrath and fear sat with his usual smile as the reporters trooped in. On the President’s desk was a yataghan, a Turkish saber someone had presented him. “I can put it in the wall at thirty paces,” Roosevelt said gleefully.
“How far down Pennsylvania Avenue can you throw it?” asked a reporter. The President laughed but did not answer. Even yataghans could not help now. When the measure finally emerged from the Senate and moved to the House, the hurricane roared to a climax. Hundreds of thousands of telegrams denouncing the plan poured in on the legislators. Because O’Connor and his Rules Committee opposed the plan, the leaders could not get a special rule governing debate. They lost control of the bill at the start, and soon it was caught in parliamentary tangles. Obstructionists delayed consideration by endless points of order, quorum calls, questions of personal privilege. As debate raged day after day, powerful interest groups pressed their claims for exempting their pet bureaus from reorganization.
Forced back on the defensive, Roosevelt took steps both to counteract the group pressures and to quiet the popular fear of presidential power that had been whipped up. Remembering the charges that he had lost the Supreme Court fight because he made compromises too little and too late, he began to negotiate concessions. The Office of Education was exempted in the face of a wave of fear among religious groups that its relocation in the bureaucratic structure would mean more federal control. So was the Veterans Bureau in the wake of protests by ex-servicemen’s groups. Other key agencies got immunity. The most important concession involved a crucial question of presidential power. In the original bill Congress had had power to veto presidential reorganization proposals only by a two-thirds vote in both Houses; by a compromise, only a majority vote was required, with the effect that presidential reorganization plans would be far easier to defeat.
Roosevelt’s move to calm popular fear was sudden and dramatic. Reporters at Warm Springs were summoned late at night to receive a presidential announcement. It read:
“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.”
The President went on to denounce a “carefully manufactured partisan and political opposition.” He promised that in almost every case he would go along with congressional opinion on specific reorganization. He mentioned examples of “silly nightmares conjured up at the instigation either of those who would restore the government to those who owned it between 1921 and 1933, or of those who for one reason or another seek deliberately to wreck the present administration.” The harshness of Roosevelt’s words betrayed the hurt and vexation he felt.
All to no avail. On April 8, by a razor-thin margin of 204 to 196, the House returned the measure to committee. As the vote was announced wild cheering broke out among representatives in the chamber. Congress was in open revolt. The White House was in a quandary. Farley and Early wanted the President to conciliate Congress. Ickes, heartsick over losing his chance to annex the Forest Service, implored Roosevelt to carry on the fight. It was up to the President, Corcoran declared, to show whether he was going out like Herbert Hoover or like Andrew Jackson. But Roosevelt would not press the fight. Already he was turning to another urgent matter: his spending program. He dispatched a letter to Majority Leader Rayburn. “Thanks for the good fight …” He added that there should be no personal recrimination.
No retaliation—yet.
“The old Roosevelt magic has lost its kick,” Hugh Johnson crowed happily in the spring of 1938. “The diverse elements in his Falstaffian army can no longer be kept together and led by a melodious whinny and a winning smile.” Pundits of press and radio across the nation sagely nodded agreement. The spell was broken. But why? On this there were a host of theories.
Some argued that the old politician was losing his touch, but the reporters who watched Roosevelt closely scoffed at the notion. The President’s fireside chats were as warm and stirring as ever; he was perhaps even more charming and persuasive with visitors; he appeared to have lost none of his cocky self-assurance. His mental reflexes had, if anything, been sharpened during the presidential years. In the semiweekly jousting of the press conferences, the President usually came out on top. Asked one day what he thought of a Senator’s proposal to make it a felony for a newspaper knowingly to publish a falsehood, he answered, quick as a flash, “I’m trying to pare expenses and I don’t want any more prisons!” Trying to outsmart him, some reporters at a Press Club dinner wrote on the back of a menu, “I hereby nominate Herbert [a fellow reporter] as Ambassador to the North Pole,” folded the words over to conceal them, and sent the menu to the guest of honor for his “autograph.” When the nomination paper came back they discovered that Roosevelt had changed “North” to “South” and had innocently added “North Pole already occupied.”
No, nothing had happened to Roosevelt’s political skill or acuteness. Another theory was that Roosevelt’s election triumph of 1936 had left him with a bad case of overconfidence, that this overconfidence had led to the bungling tactics of the court reform defeat, and this defeat had brought down Roosevelt’s political house of cards. This interpretation made some sense as long as it could be argued that a better presentation of the court bill or greater willingness to accept a compromise might have saved the proposal. It was clearer in retrospect that no court reform bill of significance nor, indeed, any administrative reform bill of any significance could have won passage in the 1937-38 Congress. In short, the reasons for Roosevelt’s defeats on Capitol Hill lay deeper than such simple explanations assumed.
Searching for these deeper reasons, students of politics noted the historical fact that even the stronger presidents—men like Jefferson and Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt—had met formidable difficulties in their second terms. With a president’s power due to evaporate at a set date, the focus of power shifts from the White House to cabinet members and senators jockeying for the throne. Was not Roosevelt simply encountering the centrifugal forces inherent in this historic situation? To some extent he was. But as a resourceful politician, Roosevelt could also exploit a great countervailing force—namely, his control of the 1940 nomination. Roosevelt insisted to intimates—and the word got out fast enough—that the nomination would go to a Democrat who met the tests of a New Dealer by the President’s standards. He planned, in short, to choose his successor. And there was always the possibility that Roosevelt himself would run—a possibility that Roosevelt had skillfully played up, even while ostensibly dismissing it, only six weeks after his second term began, when he spoke laughingly at the Democratic victory dinner of his plans for January 20, 1941.
Another explanation of Roosevelt’s loss of leadership over Congress was quite simple. The President’s popularity with the voters, it was pointed out, had slipped considerably during the Roosevelt recession, and congressmen were jumping off the presidential bandwagon as soon as they found this drop in their own constituencies. That explanation, too, had some merit; on the other hand, Roosevelt had lost the court fight before the recession and at a time when his personal popularity was still high. Moreover, his standing with the people had slipped badly during the first term—only to rise again in 1936. No congressman could dare count on continued unpopularity for the resilient politician in the White House.
What, then, could explain the revolt in Congress? It was not surprising that the real explanation eluded the observers of the day. Only as Roosevelt’s first term fell into fuller perspective and as the precise nature of his relations with Congress during that period was revealed did the basic situation become clear. The essence of the situation was this: Roosevelt had led Congress during his first term by his adroit and highly personal handling of congressional leaders and by exploiting the sense of crisis; but, intent on immediate tactical gains on Capitol Hill, he had neglected to build up a position of strength with the rank and file of Congress.
With his usual pragmatism, Roosevelt at the outset had faced up to the hard facts of the distribution of power in Congress. Since committee chiefs had power, he would deal with committee chiefs. And he did so with such charm, such tact, such flexibility, such brilliant timing, such sensitivity to the leaders’ own political problems that the President’s personal generalship often meant the difference between passage and defeat of key bills. Time and time again he won the support of men like Glass and Harrison and Tydings and Sumners and Doughton not because they liked the New Deal in general or the measure in particular but because they liked and were willing to defer to the man who was President. Roosevelt’s leadership talents lay in his ability to shift quickly and gracefully from persuasion to cajolery to flattery to intrigue to diplomacy to promises to horse-trading—or to concoct just that formula which his superb instincts for personal relations told him would bring around the most reluctant congressman.
“It is probably safe to say,” said onetime presidential assistant Stanley High, “that during 1933, 1934, and 1935 a record-breaking number of men of some political eminence went to the President’s office in a state of incipient revolt and left it to declare to the world their subscription to things that they did not subscribe to.”
A good method while it worked—and it did work for four years. The supreme test of that method came in the second Hundred Days. To put through a restless and bewildered Congress the enduring legislation of the New Deal at the fag end of the 1935 session was the ultimate tribute to Roosevelt’s capacity to prod and charm and reason balking legislators into acting.
But there was a price to pay. Boiling under the surface even while the great measures thrashed their way through Congress was a deep bitterness toward the White House. Men like Glass deserted the administration as the program of 1935 revealed the shape of things to come. Even loyalists like Byrnes complained that they had had to “swallow a lot” for the White House; they were close to the breaking point. As Roosevelt in his foxlike fashion crossed and recrossed his own trail in maneuvering his bills through Congress, congressmen had to reverse positions and cover up for the White House. They had to take the rap—and they were tired of taking the rap.
Bitterness was sharpest in the House. Administration supporters there complained to Roosevelt that party organization and discipline were nonexistent. The Democratic Steering Committee—the logical link between the President and his partisans in the House—was virtually ignored by the White House. When Hopkins held a peace conference with this committee in July 1935, member after member rose to excoriate the administration’s flouting of rank-and-filers, to complain about appointments, even to threaten reprisal against the White House.
Roosevelt’s breathing spell of late 1935, his limited legislative program for 1936, and the closing of ranks in the campaign staved off rebellion for a time. But the President’s effort to carry out his program to help the needy one-third of the people precipitated the new and sterner battles of the second term.
Had the New Deal, then, really been dealt? Was it all over? What about the scores of young New Dealers washed into Congress by the Roosevelt tidal wave of 1936? Were not they the makings of congressional majorities for an expanded New Deal?
They might have served this purpose—but they never had the chance. For another price that Roosevelt had to pay for his dependence on the old ranking Democrats was the consolidation of the powers of these leaders in Congress. He had confirmed their political status, their high-priority claims on administration favors, their near monopoly of access to the White House. He had failed to encourage rank-and-file organization in Congress behind a New Deal program.
When Pittsburgh Democratic boss David Lawrence wanted to bring in three new Democratic congressmen to meet the President early in 1937, Roosevelt put him off, finally allotted three minutes, and then postponed even this appointment. “There is a group of aggressive progressive Democrats who have stuck by you through thick and thin, about seventy-five in number, as well as a number of other progressives not classed as Democrats,” Representative Kent Keller wrote the President in April 1938, “and I do not believe that you have ever called in a single one of this group in consultation as to administration policies.” Roosevelt, he said, was dealing only with a small group of congressional leaders. Characteristically the President told McIntyre, “Have him come in to see me.” But things went on as before; the rank and file remained adrift. When a year later another friendly congressman urged him to establish contact with the rank and file by inviting them to the White House in small groups, the President replied that he would like to do this but his day was simply too crowded.
The President hoped that the Democratic legislators would remain responsible to the party platform of 1936. The congressmen, however, had had little part in drawing up the platform. They felt responsible to the majorities that had elected them in their districts; in any event, it was the voters in their districts who would determine whether or not they would stay in Congress. And not only this; something of tremendous importance was happening throughout the mid-1930’s within the American electorate.
It is often said that a coalition of labor and farm groups created the New Deal. But this can be reversed. It is just as true—and of greater significance—that the New Deal helped create a new labor movement and a new farm movement in America, along with a dozen other immensely strengthened groups. And it was this massive swelling in the size and number and strength of politically oriented groups that changed decisively the pattern of power in counties and townships and wards and precincts, where congressmen were elected and defeated.
Labor was the most striking case in point. Sapped and crippled by depression, the unions had recruited millions of new members with the help of Section 7a and the Wagner Act. By 1937 the Committee for Industrial Organization had broken completely with the AFL and was gathering in millions of workers in steel, autos, rubber, electrical goods, and other mass-production industries. As fiery young leaders debouched from the ranks, unions took on a new militance and a new exhilaration. Contributing its funds and ordering its organizers into the precincts, the CIO had given Roosevelt’s re-election campaign a mighty boost. Then, for month after month, the country had seen turbulent labor erupting in mass demonstrations, sit-down strikes, quickie stoppages, parades, police violence.
Striding across the front pages of the nation’s newspapers was the new army’s glowering, blustering commander, John L. Lewis. “The Huey Long of labor,” Huey himself had called him, and no one could have better personalized Roosevelt’s political predicament in his second term than the burly, pug-faced CIO chief. By 1938 Lewis was seething over Roosevelt’s “ingratitude.” For all his denunciations of businessmen, Lewis had a commercial approach to politics. The President, he felt, should pay off for favors granted. But what had Roosevelt done? He had taken a neutral stand during the period of sit-down strikes with his famous statement, “A plague on both your houses.” He had publicly rebuked Lewis for demanding White House recognition of its 1936 friends. The President, Lewis growled, was even stealing his lieutenants—especially Sidney Hillman—away from him by giving them government jobs and drawing them into the charmed White House circle. Roosevelt and Hopkins, he complained, were balking CIO efforts to organize WPA workers. Where, demanded Lewis, was the pay-off?
Conflict between the two men was inevitable even if they both had not been prima donnas. To speak and act for his followers, Lewis had to move toward leftist politics and direct action. Roosevelt, with a different constituency and needing support in Congress, had to continue his delicate balancing act among power blocs. Lewis derided Roosevelt’s public role as a great humanitarian and forthright fighter for the underdog; Roosevelt, he said, was weak, tricky, and lacking in conviction. Distrusting the mine leader, and fearing that he would disrupt the coalition, Roosevelt struck out at him at critical moments. And Lewis, fighting for his organization’s life during the crucial organizing drives, recoiled from what he called Roosevelt’s “catlike scratches.”
If farmers lacked such a spectacular leader to dramatize their claims, they presented an even better case than labor of the New Deal’s impact on groups. Indeed, rarely has an organization owed its power more directly to governmental action than the strongest farm group, the American Farm Bureau Federation. For the thousands of county farm bureaus that made up the Federation had originally been established as semigovernmental units, and their extension agents took on much of the practical administration of the New Deal farm programs at the same time that they served as unofficial recruiting officers for the Federation. As the farm programs expanded, so did the Federation’s membership, which more than doubled between 1933 and 1938.
The Federation’s relation to the New Deal was curious: administratively it was geared in with programs, while politically it could operate as an independent force, putting pressure on Roosevelt and Wallace. Other farm groups were active too. The commodity associations burgeoned as the New Deal poured benefits into the hands of woolgrowers, beet sugar raisers, pork producers, cattle raisers, peanut growers, and a host of other groups. And the bigger the association, the more pressure it could turn on Washington.
The situation was duplicated in other sectors of American life. The WPA brought into being the Workers Alliance, whose leaders—some of them members of the Communist party—were agitating noisily for more and bigger work projects. The National Youth Administration was a focus of interest for youth groups. Lending and housing programs stimulated a host of associations linked to these activities. Government lawyers had a large part in forming the National Lawyers’ Guild, as a rival group to the conservative American Bar Association.
“You know,” Roosevelt said to Nation editor Max Lerner in 1938, “this is really a great country. The framework of democracy is so strong and so elastic that it can get along and absorb a Huey Long and a John L. Lewis.” A perceptive remark—but an incomplete one. While powerful new forces were straining within the Grand Coalition, while these forces were acting like a centrifuge that spun locally elected congressmen into their separate orbits, forcible leadership was all the more necessary in the White House as a focus for the national interest, as a rallying point for the liberal majority, and as a unifying force for government action. This was the supreme crisis of leadership that Roosevelt faced in the spring of 1938.
“There is no question,” Roosevelt wrote Ambassador Biddle in Warsaw late in 1937, “that the German-Italian-Japanese combination is being amazingly successful—bluff, power, accomplishment or whatever it may be.” The President could not say the same about his own foreign policy making. Stalled on the domestic front, he faced formidable congressional opposition in his efforts to awaken the country to the rising dangers abroad. Indeed, Roosevelt’s handling of foreign policy making was especially ineffective because there his program and strategy were even more opportunistic than at home.
The President of course had definite opinions about certain aspects of the international situation. The aggressions of Italy, Japan, and Germany were to him simply “armed banditry,” and he was not reluctant to say so in private. He wished—again privately—for “more spine” in the British Foreign Office. Squarely opposing the idea of peace at any price, he wanted co-operation among the democratic nations to save the peace. But on crucial operating questions concerning the kind of international co-operation, the extent of German-Italian-Japanese participation in peace programs, and above all the commitments to be undertaken by the United States, he was uncertain. In late 1937 and 1938 he was still searching for a peace formula, with his eye always cocked on the barons of isolationism on Capitol Hill.
Following the disappointing reaction to his “quarantine” speech in October 1937, Roosevelt tried again to take the initiative, although in a different direction. He had long toyed with the idea of sponsoring a dramatic meeting at sea of chiefs of state. Late in October he decided the time was ripe for a somewhat less spectacular move—an Armistice Day meeting of all diplomatic representatives in the White House, to hear a message from the President. Based on suggestions from Under Secretary Sumner Welles, who had been working closely with the President and somewhat independently of Hull, the message would propose a new effort to reach agreement on basic principles of peaceful international relations, on ways of giving all peoples access on equal terms to the world’s raw materials, on methods of changing international agreements peacefully, and on the rights and obligations of neutrals in the unhappy event of war. Surely a moderate program—except for the suggestion of treaty revision to remove certain inequities of Versailles.
The plan died aborning. Hull was utterly opposed to it. He feared that a short day or two of open deliberations would arouse false hopes, unduly provoke the dictators, and produce little practical good. The very features that appealed to the President—a colorful White House assemblage suddenly convened as a world forum for a dramatic Rooseveltian pronouncement—troubled this most undramatic of men. Yet actually, since he believed strongly in the basic principles the President would espouse, the reasons for Hull’s opposition lay deeper than this. Part of the trouble was Welles’s key role in the project. More important, Hull feared that forthright presidential action would arouse Congress. An old hand at wheedling and appeasing the lawmakers, he was alarmed lest his efforts to bring Congress around to internationalism would be set back. Reluctantly Roosevelt dropped the plan for the time being.
While democratic leaders diddled, dictators acted. In November 1937 they formally established the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis. Japanese troops drove even deeper into China. The Brussels Conference failed utterly to alleviate the crisis in the Far East. Everywhere the arms rush was intensifying. And on November 5 Hitler summoned his generals to the Reichstag, told them of his plans for the conquest of eastern Europe, and ordered them to prepare for inevitable war. The generals knew that Austria was first on their Fuehrer’s list.
Shortly after New Year’s Day 1938, Roosevelt again turned to his plans for an international conference. This time, however, he followed Hull’s suggestion of sounding out Britain first. Prime Minister Chamberlain’s reply was like a douche of ice water. The President’s plan, he wrote, would cut across his own efforts at “a measure of appeasement” of Italy and Germany. He had been working for months toward this end, he protested, and the stage had been carefully set. Would the President hold up action for a time?
The President would and did. But he was anxious over certain revelations in Chamberlain’s letter: the prime minister had indicated that to appease Mussolini he was prepared to recognize Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia. Roosevelt promptly urged Chamberlain not to take this step—for it would seriously affect American public opinion. Hull told the British Ambassador bluntly that recognition would be a corrupt bargain that would rouse a feeling of disgust in America.
Chamberlain’s rebuff of Roosevelt and the ensuing rift shocked a keen student of world affairs watching from the wings. The rejection of the President’s proffered hand, Churchill wrote ten years later, was the loss of the last frail chance to save the world from tyranny otherwise than by war. Yet Chamberlain, unlike Roosevelt, was pursuing a calculated course of action, designed at best to turn the Axis away from attacking the democracies and at least to spar for time to rearm. And a key element in his calculations was that, owing to isolationist feeling in America, Roosevelt could not be relied on to back up his principles with action. “It is always best and safest,” Chamberlain said acidly, “to count on nothing from the Americans but words.”
As it turned out, Chamberlain later sent a second, more cordial letter to Roosevelt welcoming the President’s proposal. The prime minister’s hand was forced by his young foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, who had returned to London from a vacation trip to hint at his resignation unless Chamberlain altered his policies. But it was now too late. Hitler was already moving resolutely ahead.
Early in February the Fuehrer consolidated his military position at home by ousting the generals who had spoken out against his war program and appointing himself commander in chief. At once Hitler turned his eye to the south where lay the glittering prize of Austria, portal to Czechoslovakia and the lands beyond. Summoning Austrian Chancellor von Schuschnigg to his retreat just over the border in Berchtesgaden, Hitler scolded and bullied him for hours. “Perhaps I shall be suddenly overnight in Vienna, like a spring storm,” he ranted. “Do you want to turn Austria into another Spain?” Schuschnigg gave in to Hitler’s demands, but he tried to strengthen his hand by holding a plebiscite on the issue of Austrian independence. This Hitler would not brook. With Mussolini acquiescent and Britain passive, he knew that he could afford to strike. On March 12 German tanks and troops swept across the border, and within a few hours Austria was his.
The news brought a quick flare-up of public opinion in America. Newspaper editorials were indignant. Roosevelt was silent, but a few days later he wrote “Grand!” on a speech of Hull’s that served as a kind of official statement. The secretary’s statement, however, was the same old litany—a bold stand against “international lawlessness,” a warning against isolationism, and a shying away from American commitments.
Roosevelt was silent—but not passive. “I am in the midst of a long process of education—and the process seems to be working slowly but surely,” he wrote a friend. But how slow would education be? Always his thoughts returned to the isolationists and their leaders on Capitol Hill. He was amused to read a letter from an Englishman, sent on to him by a Boston schoolmaster.
“That is a delightful letter,” he wrote back. “Is it not a funny thing that no European has the foggiest notion of our system of government or of our public thought in regard to European politics? His suggestion that the President should present 500 aeroplanes to Great Britain is particularly joyous. Almost it makes me feel like a dictator! Can you see the expression on the face of the Congress or on the face of the Editors of the Boston Transcript and the Boston Herald if I were to ask for such authority from Congress? I am not even considering what the Boston Irish or the Kansas New Englanders would do.…”
Editors and congressmen, Irishmen and Kansans—could they be educated in time by Roosevelt, or would they be educated too late by events?
Events were hurrying on at an ever dizzier pace. By 1938 Spain had become a cockpit of international combat. Tens of thousands of Italian “volunteers,” thousands of German officers and technicians, quantities of Axis tanks, artillery, and aircraft braced Franco’s attacks. The government, with the help of its International Brigade and later of Soviet arms, had twice staved off heavy attacks on Madrid. But the Loyalists’ Aragon offensive failed in the summer of 1937; Italian forces captured Bilbao; Santander and Gijou fell. The League Assembly announced that “veritable foreign army corps” were operating in Spain. By 1938 Loyalist chances looked dim.
Roosevelt from the start had favored the Loyalist cause. He understood the international character of the war; he looked on the Madrid government as the constitutional authority, under the control of a popular-front coalition that included the Communists. Publicly, however, the President was adamantly neutral. His first decisive step—taken significantly during the 1936 campaign—was to put a moral embargo on the export of arms to both sides. When several American exporters readied shiploads of war material, the President asked Congress to extend the arms embargo of the Neutrality Act to Spain. In all Congress only one person—a Farmer-Laborite—voted against the measure. One load of planes cleared the three-mile limit just in time, only to fall later into Franco’s hands.
As the months passed Roosevelt felt increasingly distressed over the course of events in Spain. Noninterference became in effect “non-noninterference,” for Franco benefited from the policy. A savage bombing of the Basque shrine city of Guernica by German and Italian planes aroused American opinion. From Spain Ambassador Bowers warned the administration that the embargo was playing into the hands of Franco and Mussolini and Hitler. Ickes was outspokenly indignant about what he called America’s shameful role in Spain. In the State Department, Welles was gravely troubled; he saw that a Franco victory would mean a decisive strategic advance for Italy in the Mediterranean. Even some ardent noninterventionists—men like Norman Thomas and Senator Borah—opposed Roosevelt’s policy as unjust and, indeed, unneutral.
There were arguments and forces on the other side. Great Britain, France, and a score of other nations were following a policy ostensibly of strict nonintervention, designed to localize the conflict in Spain. Roosevelt feared to undertake action that cut across these efforts. Any inclination he had to shift policy ran into the stubborn opposition of Hull, backed by a group of career officials who were eager to follow the British lead on the question. Roosevelt’s hands were tied also by the sweeping endorsement that administration and Congress had given to neutrality at almost any cost.
Beset by these pressures, Roosevelt wavered. At one point in the spring of 1938 he considered raising the embargo on arms to Madrid. Senator Nye himself had introduced a resolution to raise the embargo, and the New York Times reported that Roosevelt was on the verge of acting.
But nothing happened. “A black page in American history,” Ickes told the President. Roosevelt argued that lifting the ban would be pointless, for munitions could not go across the Spanish frontier. When Ickes showed how these difficulties could be overcome, the President shifted his ground. He had discussed the matter with congressional leaders that morning, he told Ickes. To raise the embargo would mean the loss of every Catholic vote in the coming fall election, Roosevelt said, and Democratic congressmen opposed it.
So the cat was out of the bag—the “mangiest, scabbiest cat ever,” Ickes barked into his diary a few days later. “This proves up to the hilt,” Ickes went on, “what so many people have been saying, namely, that the Catholic minorities in Great Britain and America have been dictating the international policy with respect to Spain.”
Ickes was only partly right. Not merely the caution of congressmen but Roosevelt’s own indecision was involved in policy toward Spain. Indeed, the President wavered again later in 1938 as the rebel forces pressed on to Madrid, and once again Hull had to dissuade his chief from acting. Still, Ickes had put his finger on the heart of the problem. The men on Capitol Hill and the minority groups behind them had their grip on levers of action or obstruction that touched directly the balance of power and the flow of events far outside the country’s borders. Unredeemed by decisiveness in the White House, the congressional deadlock on the Potomac cast its shadow across the world.