Despite his assurances to the cabinet at its year-end meeting, Roosevelt continued to be tired and frustrated throughout the winter of 1937–38. The next three years of his term looked bleak. Conservative Democrats, mindful of how the Court fight, the recession (which 58 percent of a Gallup poll described as a business depression), and public resistance to hints in his quarantine speech of international intervention had weakened his political standing, which he no longer felt was under his command. With Republicans in a distinct minority after their defeats in the 1936 presidential and congressional elections, dissenting Democrats were now Roosevelt’s strongest adversaries, especially across the South, which feared reformist intervention in local economic and racial affairs by White House authorities. If Roosevelt was considering running in 1940 for an unprecedented third term, party opponents believed that they could stop him with support from millions of Americans alienated by his unbalanced budgets, tacit acceptance of labor radicalism in the sit-down strikes, increased unemployment of up to ten million in the recession, and his alleged attempt at dictatorial control similar to Mussolini’s and Hitler’s.
Meanwhile, newspaper owners, led by William Randolph Hearst and Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, America’s most “blackguard” paper, were, Ickes said, “trying to get something on any member of the Cabinet” that could be turned into “an indictable offense.” Later in the year, when Roosevelt fled Washington for another fishing holiday, he told Daisy, “What a comfort to get away from the damn newspapers (’scuse me )—I wish I had enough money to start a newspaper—confined to news without interpretation, coloration, twisting or downright lying—I think it would be a financial success!”
While publishers like Hearst and McCormick were avowed Roosevelt enemies and left no doubt of their eagerness to end his political regime, most reporters admired and openly supported the president. Despite widespread editorial opposition to Roosevelt’s White House, 73 percent of Americans, influenced by sympathetic portraits of the president written by reporters, thought that the press treated his administration fairly.
At the start of 1938, mindful of the growing antipathy to his presidency and exhausted by the pressures of the office, Roosevelt had no clear plan to run again. Although between 55 and 63 percent of Americans in the early months of 1938 continued to approve of his presidential performance, 70 percent said they opposed a third term. Roosevelt took solace in looking ahead to his post–White House years. He would be fifty-nine when he left office and planned to write his memoirs. Although he loved being president, he was realistic enough about his current political standing to recognize that he would be inviting defeat if he tried for another term. Memories of Theodore Roosevelt’s attempt in 1912 for a third term “colored FDR’s consideration of what another run for the White House could bring. Nonetheless, in the three years remaining to him, he retained some hope of advancing international cooperation or at least of expanding U.S. military power to deter aggressors and further humanizing American social relations.
In his January 1938 State of the Union address, which he delivered in person to a joint congressional session to ensure that the full Congress would take heed of his words, and on the radio to reach a large public audience, Roosevelt focused less on the actual state of the union than on the misjudgments of governments abroad and Americans at home. He delivered the speech “in a slow and deliberate voice” over the course of forty-five minutes, placing great emphasis on controversial issues like the fascist threat and antidemocratic U.S. business monopolies. This angered conservative Democrats, who were seated in the two front rows of the House facing him. Senators Josiah Bailey of North Carolina, Carter Glass of Virginia, and Millard Tydings of Maryland made their hostility to the president and his New Deal advisers like Ben Cohen, Tommy Corcoran, and Harry Hopkins all too evident by sitting on their hands during his speech and offering only the most perfunctory applause when he was introduced and concluded his speech. “Democrats, Democrats,” Carter Glass exclaimed about Roosevelt’s administration, “why, Thomas Jefferson would not speak to these people.” Mindful of the deepening divide, Ickes confided to his diary, “The war is on fiercer than ever between the reactionaries and the liberals in the Democratic party.”
Roosevelt’s opening salvo in his speech warned about the hazardous state of international affairs and urged the country to keep itself “adequately strong in self-defense. . . . Peace is most greatly jeopardized,” he said, “. . . by those nations where democracy has been discarded or has never developed.” He reminded Americans that they could not afford to ignore fascist “disregard for treaty obligations” and attacks on other nations. “The future peace of mankind,” he stressed, depended on the restoration or establishment of democracy in the lawless nations. No one with the slightest knowledge of developments abroad could miss the reference to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia; Japan’s assault on China; the fascist rebellion against Spain’s democratically elected government; Germany’s threat to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, and Great Britain; or the victory of fascism in Romania, where Germany had financed sixty newspapers and the king had appointed a premier whose party had won only 9 percent of the vote in a recent election. In raising concerns about foreign threats to the United States, Roosevelt countered isolationist sentiment by striking resonant chords with most Americans, who favored stronger air, land, and naval forces. Public sympathy for preparedness in case of fascist aggression against democratic countries, including the United States, had convinced Roosevelt that disputing isolationism was best accomplished by raising the threat of attack rather than idealistic appeals to preserving democracy everywhere.
As for domestic affairs, “candor,” Roosevelt said, dictated that he caution against returning to “conduct of [a] national government after the practice of 1787 or 1837 or 1887.” The challenges in 1938 to satisfy “human needs” were “infinitely greater . . . than in any previous period in the life of our Republic.” Congress, the courts, and the country needed “to face facts” not as they wished them to be but as they were. The imperative for 1938 was effective government regulation of agriculture and industry and the assurance of a minimum wage and maximum hours for workers. Opponents of these measures, he asserted, had no viable alternatives to propose, and “that is not what you or I would call helpful citizenship.” As for Congress, he reminded it that “those suffering hardship . . . have a right to call upon the Government for aid; and a government worthy of its name must make fitting response.”
In the first three months of the year stock and farm prices, industrial production, and employment continued a seven-month downward slide. When neither high-profile conversations with prominent business chiefs intended to raise business confidence, which some thought was the root cause of the economic slide, nor limited expansion of government spending stemmed the downturn, Roosevelt felt stymied in his search for answers to the country’s economic troubles.
By the end of February, the “appeasement” campaign of business, one historian says, was “a shambles. . . . Business leaders (and the business press) were deriding the entire affair as a ‘con’ designed to promote cooptation, not cooperation.” It was seen as a way “to permit the administration ‘to wait to see what happens this spring.’” But Roosevelt himself never had much confidence in wooing businessmen as a solution to the downturn. As he told Fred I. Kent, a prominent New York banker and businessman, who chided him for taking counsel from “impractical theorists,” he and many of his associates suffered from “a form of narrowness and lack of education” about the difficulties faced by ordinary citizens and the virtue of using federal power to assist them. Yet at the same time, mindful that 63 percent of a Gallup poll opposed a big Keynesian program of deficit spending, Roosevelt was left without a way to move forward. White House inaction “served to underscore the absence of any coherent policy for confronting the recession.”
Events abroad deepened Roosevelt’s sense of his loss of control. Fascism seemed triumphant everywhere. Not only were the Japanese expanding across China and unrepentant for their indiscriminate bombing and conquest of Nanking, China’s capital, where between two hundred and three hundred thousand civilians were massacred in January and February of 1938, but Europe seemed at the mercy of fascist aggression as well. Hitler’s Germany seized Austria in a March 12 invasion and celebrated a 99 percent favorable vote for Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to Germany. The acquiescence of Britain and Italy in Hitler’s incorporation of Austria into the Third Reich added to Roosevelt’s fears of fascist gains threatening democracy. Simultaneously, British plans to recognize Italy’s Ethiopian conquest, which triggered the resignation of Foreign Minister Anthony Eden from Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet, moved Roosevelt to tell John Cudahy, his ambassador to Ireland, “If a Chief of Police makes a deal with the leading gangsters and the deal results in no more hold-ups, that Chief of Police will be called a great man—but if the gangsters do not live up to their word the Chief of Police will go to jail. Some people are, I think, taking very long chances—don’t you?”
A constitutional amendment proposed by Indiana representative Louis Ludlow to transfer the war-making power from Congress to a national referendum, except for the case of an invasion, also distressed him. Roosevelt warned Congress that such a provision would be “impractical in its application and incompatible with our representative form of government.” He saw it crippling “any president in his conduct of our foreign relations, and would encourage other nations to believe that they could violate American rights with impunity.” Instead of keeping the United States out of war as intended, the amendment would make it more likely. The amendment’s defeat by only 21 votes, followed by a failed attempt to revise the country’s neutrality laws to restore executive control over foreign policy, left Roosevelt feeling largely powerless.
In 1938, as in 1933, at the depths of the Depression, Roosevelt believed it essential to address domestic issues first. To revive enthusiasm for reforms that could spur an expansionary surge, Roosevelt traveled to Georgia in March, where his Warm Springs retreat gave him standing as a native son and he could celebrate the revival of the small Georgia city of Gainesville after it had been devastated by a 1936 tornado. In a speech at the city center, he praised the work of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, PWA, and WPA in rebuilding and modernizing local government structures and private homes. It was a demonstration of New Deal effectiveness in not only repairing the city’s infrastructure but also eliminating “old conditions of which you were not proud.” The work of reconstruction, Roosevelt emphasized, had “national significance” and more immediately, regional implications. He urged Americans to apply the principles of generosity to national problems, as had been demonstrated in Gainesville. “National progress and national prosperity,” he said, “are being held back chiefly because of selfishness on the part of a few.” The current situation was, he asserted, reminiscent of what had happened in the United States between 1921 and 1933 when advocates of unlimited laissez-faire held power. Because the South was the most economically backward part of the country and the region where Roosevelt believed progressive advances could make the greatest difference, he urged an end to feudal conditions there, which he compared to fascism: “If you believe in the one, you lean to the other,” he said. Progressive reforms in these states, he added, would not only bring prosperity to the least affluent members of Southern society but also would advance the well-being of more comfortable citizens as well.
Roosevelt’s message found little support in the national arena. His hold on Congress, and especially conservative Southern Democrats, who saw the New Deal as destructive to “existing social-economic relations,” had all but collapsed. As Virginia senator Carter Glass observed, “The South would better begin thinking whether it will continue to cast its 152 electoral votes according to the memories of the Reconstruction era of 1865 and thereafter, or will have spirit and courage enough to face the new Reconstruction era that northern so-called Democrats are menacing us with.”
Congressional votes on an executive reorganization bill were painful evidence of Roosevelt’s diminished political power. Attempts to reorganize executive functions to reduce government costs had a long history, dating back to at least the Taft presidency in the first decade of the century. But in 1938 the major hurdle was not opposition to making the executive branch more efficient but allegations that Roosevelt intended to use the reform to make himself a dictator by transferring congressional powers to the White House. After the Court fight had eroded the president’s standing, other opponents viewed the reorganization bill as an opportunity to reduce his influence even further by exploiting public fears of a dictatorship. Michigan’s Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg claimed that the president’s reorganization initiative was “more sinister as a symbol than as a reality. But we are dreadfully sensitive these days to symbols—whether they be fasces or swastikas or hammers and cycles [sic] or new blue eagles over the White House.”
The White House also saw symbolic importance in the reorganization debate, for as Ickes observed, “If the President is beaten on this reorganization bill, it will be another major defeat.” Even some friends of the administration, including congressmen eager to preserve legislative powers, functionaries in various government agencies fretting over threats to their domains, and cabinet secretaries who feared it might eliminate some of their departments’ agencies or shift them to other departments, saw reasons to go against what a mystified president considered a rather innocuous measure. Catholic prelates, who had applauded Roosevelt’s appointment of Catholics and Jews to staff his administration and had been sympathetic to its government programs helping the needy, were fearful that the bill would empower the president to establish a Department of Education, which might then take control of parochial schools and eliminate their religious teachings. Conservatives, for their part, foresaw the establishment of a Department of Welfare run by Harry Hopkins, which would greatly increase the government’s deficit spending and give Hopkins a launching pad for a 1940 presidential campaign.
An outpouring of newspaper ads, op-ed columns, and radio speeches, highlighted by Father Coughlin’s reemergence from retirement, and what Roosevelt biographer Kenneth S. Davis describes as “deluges of more than [330,000] telegrams addressed to congressmen and senators” at a cost of $150,000, fueled a campaign against the bill. Although the Senate passed the administration’s proposal by a scant 5 votes, the House, persuaded by Massachusetts senator David Walsh’s assertion that approval of the bill would be tantamount “to the plunging of a dagger into the very heart of democracy,” rejected Roosevelt’s insistence on pushing it forward by sending it back to the rules committee by an 8-vote margin. Although Roosevelt had released a letter to the press asserting that he had no interest in becoming a dictator, he refused to dignify the opposition by attacking it in a Fireside Chat. “The President of the United States cannot engage in a radio debate with the [conservative] Boake Carters and Father Coughlins,” he wrote a friend, who had urged him to refute the overheated charges against the measure in a national speech. In any case, Roosevelt believed that the attacks leveled against the bill were so overblown that the Democratic majorities in Congress would enact it. “I didn’t expect the vote,” Roosevelt told Jim Farley. “I can’t understand it. There wasn’t a chance for anyone to become a dictator under that bill.”
Although the defeat meant little to the long-run viability of the New Deal, and the much more “pressing matter now” was “a measure to bring about economic recovery,” Roosevelt agreed with Ickes, who told him after the bill was shelved that “his prestige and leadership were involved right up to the hilt; that if he took this defeat on the reorganization bill, he would have to expect other defeats and he wouldn’t be in a position to give effective leadership in a recovery program. . . . The important question,” Ickes added, “is not that of reorganization but the prestige of the Administration.” It was, Ickes concluded, the culmination of an opposition campaign against the president begun by the Liberty League in 1936.
The stakes were now a renewed progressive advance in achieving national prosperity and a more just society. Roosevelt’s hesitation in moving more quickly to end the recession had partly been the consequence of a divide in the administration. On one side were pro-business advocates, led by Henry Morgenthau and others in the Treasury Department, Jim Farley, and former Brain Trust adviser Aldof Berle, who urged reduced government spending and balanced budgets to promote business confidence. On the other, were left-leaning New Dealers led by Ickes, Harry Hopkins, Ben Cohen, Tommy Corcoran, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who favored increased spending on PWA, WPA, CCC, and NYA projects; passage of a Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) setting minimum wages of twenty-five cents an hour and maximum forty-four-hour work weeks; and an attack on business oligarchies, which were believed responsible for triggering the recession as a way to challenge Roosevelt, increased government control of the economy, and Democratic majorities in the 1938 and 1940 elections.
The conflicting ideas about how to restore economic growth led to a nasty fight within Roosevelt’s inner circle. Ickes criticized Morgenthau as a “thoroughgoing conservative” who gave the president “bad” advice on “fiscal and economic” matters. In early April, when Roosevelt informed Morgenthau that he was signing on to the “spenders” program, with $5 billion in pump priming, Morgenthau was brought to tears and told Roosevelt, “It not only frightens me it will frighten the country,” or more to the point, the business community, which would shudder at the news of the increased government deficits. Roosevelt chided Morgenthau for raising the deficit issue at a meeting with congressional leaders, calling his behavior “mischievous” and “obstructionist.” Convinced that Roosevelt was adopting a course that “could ruin the country,” Morgenthau threatened that he was “seriously thinking of resigning.” But pressed by Roosevelt to remain in office with praise for the job he was doing and warnings that his departure would undermine both the administration’s current legislative program and the chances for Democrats in the upcoming elections, as well as casting a long shadow over Morgenthau’s historical reputation, Morgenthau stayed on.
On April 14, Roosevelt came out swinging. He sent a message to Congress decrying the current slump that “threaten[s] the security of our people and the stability of our economic life. . . . All energies of Government and business must be directed to increasing the national income; to putting more people into private jobs; to giving security . . . to all people in all walks of life.” The first order of business was not “to weaken or destroy [the administration’s] great reforms.” Beyond that, it was essential to maintain and increase the appropriations for agencies providing relief and expansion of credit and to consider future actions to remedy “the problems of monopolistic practices and price fixing.” Appropriations to expand work projects that would quickly provide jobs for the increased ranks of the unemployed were the top priority. The fundamental issue, he added, was nothing less than the survival of democracy as a successful system of government and social organization.
That evening, Roosevelt rallied the nation to his program with his first Fireside Chat in five months. He stressed the urgency of addressing the human suffering that had been brought on by renewed economic retreat. He acknowledged that the country was not in the dire circumstances that had afflicted it in 1933, but it was in distress nonetheless. He then recounted his message to Congress calling for measures that could address the current recession and reaffirmed his allegiance to democracy and the importance of government action that addressed economic dislocations and demands for social justice.
Roosevelt’s appeals did not go unanswered. Identifying himself as a champion of democracy rather than its foe struck resonant chords with the public. When Gallup asked Americans if they favored increased government spending “to help get business out of its present slump,” those who heard the president’s radio talk were 9 percent more likely to favor the increase than those who hadn’t heard it. In addition, only 30 percent of a survey blamed Roosevelt and New Deal policies for the turndown, while 70 percent attributed it to “business, natural economic trends, bad distribution of wealth, [and] lingering effects of the World War.” Congress finally agreed to a wages and hours law and increased appropriations for public works and other New Deal programs, as Roosevelt had asked.
But Roosevelt’s requests did not receive full support, and his popularity continued to wane. While 54 percent of voters still approved of his performance, 46 percent rated it as unfavorable. Another 62 percent thought he was less popular than before, and 70 percent said they opposed a third term. Additionally, 64 percent stated that they were less well off than they had been a year earlier, and when citizens were asked how they wanted Roosevelt to fight the recession, more people favored fewer “restrictions on business initiative, such as higher taxes, reduced government spending and . . . balance[d] budget[s]” than increased government spending, as Roosevelt had proposed. And troubling to the White House, 58 percent of Americans considered the current slump to be a depression, while only 42 percent regarded it as a recession. And when people were asked if they favored replacing the existing two parties with a conservative and a liberal party, an idea that had been germinating in Roosevelt’s mind, a decisive 70 percent said no. Some White House mail gave voice to the vitriolic resistance he faced: “You will go down in history as the man who ruined America,” a North Carolinian wrote. A man from Atlanta urged him to “try dipping your head in a pail of water three times and just bring it out twice. Then the country will really recover.”
On April 30, exhausted by the battles over reorganization and remedies to combat the recession, Roosevelt fled Washington for a Caribbean vacation. His departure, with a complement of White House aides, he wrote Daisy, amounted to “a perfect day” that included sunning himself on the forward deck of the cruiser carrying him out of Charleston, South Carolina, a two-hour afternoon nap, and an evening session with his stamps and early to bed. The next day opened with Sunday services on the quarter deck followed by “a quiet P.M.” with “more sun & stamps” and passed without “any work—one detective story nearly finished—Movies tonight and now it’s bed & 10:20.” Five days into the trip he felt liberated from political pressures “& official mail which I have glanced thru’ with a feeling of complete boredom & laid aside . . . That proves that the trip has been a complete success for the more fit I am physically & mentally,” he told Daisy, “the more I incline to put off things that should be done—& the more tired I am the more I insist on keeping up to the minute & driving myself to all the official tasks—That sounds completely ‘cuckoo’ as the children say but I know C.[ertain] P.[erson] will understand.”
Roosevelt returned to Washington, as he invariably did, with renewed energy. Formerly cautious Democrats who had been fretting over budget deficits that they believed undermined business confidence now signed on to Roosevelt’s renewed call for spending. In an election year, when government projects providing jobs translated into support at the polls, congressmen and senators found supporting such programs advantageous.
On April 29, Roosevelt sent a request to Congress to curb monopolies. Tying his message to the rise of dictatorships abroad, Roosevelt warned against the “ownership of Government by an individual, a group, or by any other controlling private power.” An unprecedented concentration of economic power in America threatened not only the country’s economic well-being but its political freedom. Roosevelt asserted that the existing antimonopoly statutes were inadequate to the challenge of curbing financial and economic predators. “Business monopoly in America paralyzes the system of free enterprise . . . and is as fatal to those who manipulate it as to the people who suffer beneath its imposition.” Roosevelt wanted funding not for a remedial program but for an investigation into the problem and its remedy.
Congress, mindful of the country’s antimonopoly tradition reaching back to the nineteenth century with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the reforms of the Progressive Era, agreed to establish a Temporary National Economic Committee staffed by three senators, three congressmen, and six officials from executive departments. Although no one could determine exactly what the TNEC’s mission was, it began in June with hopes that it would produce far-reaching recommendations. It was nonetheless described as “one of the most important events of our recent history,” and an inquiry that could ensure that “the New Deal will go down in history as Roosevelt’s revolution.”
Congress’s response to Roosevelt’s recommendations on the economy encouraged him to mount a campaign to purge the Democratic Party of its most conservative members. He was especially focused on Southerners who had opposed Court packing, executive reorganization, and the Fair Labor Standards Act or wages and hours law. Southern congressmen and senators viewed FLSA’s requirements for a minimum wage as destructive to their regional economy by forcing local businesses to pay wages comparable to those in other parts of the country and inhibiting the shift of textile and other industries to a low-wage South. Southern opponents also regarded the law as an assault on Southern racial policies that made African Americans subsist on meager incomes, keeping them in a de facto, if not de jure, condition of dependence resembling slavery.
No one around the president was more supportive of these reform measures, including FLSA, than Eleanor Roosevelt, who was especially concerned about the plight of African Americans. In April, a “White House conference on more equitable distribution of federal benefits to black women and the Negro community” pointed to “discriminatory practices in the administration of public health services, social security benefits, and federal welfare programs.” As Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor’s biographer, recounts, the White House was warily aware of complaints that “every decent act toward racial justice, every union organized, every speech for equal rights was condemned as communist.” Eleanor’s support of liberal advocates of remedial action led to her being widely criticized, to which she responded, “I am accused of being a Red, as is everyone in this country who is working for better living conditions.” These attacks did more to secure her place as the leading voice of liberal reform in the administration than to discourage or deter her from urging Franklin to advance progressive measures.
The outcry across the South from Eleanor’s critics and especially from foes of FLSA revived regional antagonisms reminiscent of those of the 1920s. All but one member of the House Mississippi delegation, for example, took exception to the wages and hours bill, convincing Roosevelt that the opposition to the law would keep the region in penury as the most impoverished area of the country. “Those who are making the loudest noise” against the bill, one Southern liberal senator declared, “are slave drivers.” But Roosevelt believed that he was in fact offering Southerners a remedy for their economic backwardness, telling a Texas audience, “You need more industries in Texas, but I know you know the importance of not trying to get industries by the route of cheap wages for industrial workers.” He was pleased when he read a Birmingham, Alabama, columnist’s assertion that “the South, it may be said, is looking right, left, up, down and, over—but it still loves Roosevelt.”
If voter affection for him across the region was in fact as strong as the journalist claimed, Roosevelt believed that it would allow him to transform the Southern wing of the Democratic Party into a center of New Deal support, and as such become a vehicle for turning the whole party into an advocate of liberal policies and actions. At an April 21 press conference with the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Roosevelt was asked if he thought the solid Democratic South would remain that way much longer. Well, it’s a “funny place,” he replied and then launched into a description of the late nineteenth-century South, where the educational level was terribly low—no high school and only three or four months a year of elementary schooling. The average citizen “did not read the daily paper . . . did not read a magazine. They were getting the lowest form of pay in the entire nation, and they were therefore completely susceptible to the demagogue.” But he thought that things were changing: “The South is going to remain Democratic,” he said, but it would be “a more intelligent form of democracy. . . . It is going to be a liberal democracy.”
Roosevelt saw “ample evidence” that the South was moving in a liberal direction. In the first months of 1938, Democratic senatorial primaries in Alabama and Florida gave victories to two Roosevelt supporters. In April, the forty-three-year-old Lister Hill, who had served in the House for fifteen years, where he had been a staunch friend of the New Deal, won a Senate primary contest against former Alabama senator Tom Heflin, whom Ickes described as a conservative, anti–New Deal windbag. At the same time, the thirty-seven-year-old Claude Pepper, whose liberal advocacy included outspoken support for the wages and hours law, won a hard-fought Senate primary in Florida with Roosevelt’s backing. “The President thinks he is one of the best men who have come out of the South in a long time,” Ickes recorded. To some analysts, the Hill and Pepper victories were “proof positive that progressives are gaining ground” across the South and that the “Bourbons in the Senate” stood “on pretty soggy ground.”
One Indiana resident gave the president license to launch a wider campaign for additional progressive gains in the final two years of his term. “We must also purge our party of . . . demagogue Democrats,” the man wrote after the Hill and Pepper victories. “These few who have not only betrayed you but the people who made it possible for them to be in Washington. It is much harder to fight back when we have members within our own party, aligning with reactionaries fighting us. The party cannot keep the confidence of the people with such traitors in the party. They all should have opposition at the primaries.” Ousting conservative Democrats from office had actually been an idea that Roosevelt had been pondering since they opposed him over Court reform in 1937 and gained additional appeal when they broke with him over executive reorganization. Speechwriter Sam Rosenman, who had a close-up view of Roosevelt during this period, said, “There was no doubt of his animosity toward those who were willing to run on a liberal party platform with him and then vote against the very platform pledges on which they had been elected.” The president repeatedly complained to Rosenman about such “shenanigans. . . . But even deeper was his feeling—and I believe this was the fundamental reason for the purge—that the reactionary Democrats were doing a distinct and permanent injury to the nation.”
Martin Dies, a thirty-seven-year-old Texas congressman who had been in the House since 1931, was one of the Southern conservative Democrats whom Roosevelt found most troubling. The son of a congressman and friend of John Nance Garner, who had made Dies a member of the House Rules Committee, Dies was among a handful of congressmen who enjoyed considerable national visibility. His early support of the New Deal, which Roosevelt thought had helped give his reforms legitimacy, made Dies a favorite of the White House. But after the 1937 sit-down strikes, which he believed were controlled by communists, he became a harsh White House critic. He opposed the administration’s Wages and Hours bill and clashed with Roosevelt over making its provisions compulsory for the South.
In May 1938, Dies was named chairman of a Special House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities. The Dies Committee, as it was known, became the congressional face of what Ickes called one of the “periodic Red hunts” it was “addicted to.” Despite the embarrassment the committee brought on itself by raising suspicions about ten-year-old movie star Shirley Temple for alleged communist affiliations and its attack on the Federal Theater Project of the WPA, accusing the Project of promoting communism by producing subversive plays, it was a disturbing reminder of how reactionary some Democrats, especially from the South, could be. Few, however, exceeded the forty-three-year-old J. Parnell Thomas, a conservative New Jersey Republican opponent of the New Deal and minority committee member, who charged that the New Deal “sabotaged the capitalist system.” In 1940, he began engaging in a salary kickback arrangement that would eventually land him in prison, but well after Roosevelt was gone and could have the satisfaction of seeing so reactionary an opponent brought down.
Moved by “confidence in himself and in the public support he thought he could muster,” Roosevelt tried to “purge,” as opponents described it, the Democratic Party of its conservative senators and congressmen. But surveys of public opinion between June 11 and June 16 indicated limited support for his plan. Only 28 percent of a poll said that they wanted to see a more liberal Democratic Party, while 72 percent favored a more conservative party over the next two years. At the same time, asked if the White House should use primaries to defeat Democratic senators who had opposed Roosevelt’s Court packing plan, 69 percent of Democratic voters said, “No”; only 31 percent saw it as a good idea.
But convinced that the survival of the New Deal and possibilities of additional reforms depended on ousting uncooperative party members, Roosevelt took to the airwaves to defeat conservative foes. On a very hot June 24 evening, in the sixth year of his presidency, he gave the thirteenth of his Fireside Chats. He began by noting the eight major achievements of the current Congress, which had just adjourned for the year. He also celebrated the shift in the Supreme Court’s views on New Deal measures, saying the “lost battle” had ultimately produced a victory in a war. He reminded his listeners that the 1936 elections had demonstrated the devotion of the American people to a “sane and consistent liberalism,” proving that those who were arguing that “people were getting weary of reform” were wrong. It didn’t stop them, however, from “a campaign of defeatism . . . thrown at the heads of the President and . . . Senators and Congressmen.” Like the “Copperheads” during the Civil War, who favored “peace at any price,” these conservatives wanted his administration to abandon government efforts to build a more prosperous and just society. Turning to the coming party elections, he said that he was “not taking part in Democratic primaries,” but as head of the party he believed himself charged with “the responsibility of carrying out the definitely liberal declaration of principles set forth in the 1936 Democratic platform.” He was not opposed to any candidate on personal grounds, he added, but only to a “yes but” fellow—that is, someone who professed a commitment to progressive ideas but always found ways to avoid supporting or even opposing them.
The New York Herald Tribune reported that Roosevelt’s speech made a compelling case for continued reform: “The rich voice, the calm assurance, the adroit catchwords, the note of simple sincerity and of genial friendliness to all mankind—punctuated by neat jabs at all who oppose him—all the old magic was there without a flaw.” But, in fact, as Gallup’s earlier June poll indicated, public and congressional reaction was anything but uniformly sympathetic to presidential pressure for a turn toward the left. The response to his Fireside Chat was mixed, with critics complaining about being attacked as Copperheads, a Pennsylvania man saying that “you must be too intelligent to believe what you say,” and an Indiana minister taking the president to task for stooping “to do what you proposed regarding your opposition . . . and certain to strengthen” it. A Birmingham, Alabama, resident felt that he had lowered “the dignity of your office and the white house by telling folks how to vote.” Roosevelt was making the same mistake he had made in the Court fight: Just as his false assertion about his motive for Court packing had offended many, so his insistence that he was not telling people how to vote in the Democratic primaries, when that was exactly his intention, angered voters opposed to presidential interference in local contests and strengthened their determination to oppose him.
Meanwhile, a host of other problems was descending on him. Harry Hopkins, to whom he had become very close, had suffered a personal loss when his thirty-seven-year-old second wife died of cancer in December 1937. The following year Hopkins himself fell ill with stomach cancer and had to have surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Roosevelt’s son Jimmy, who had been working as his secretary, came down with gastric ulcers and also faced surgery.
As the recession continued to dog the economy, Philip La Follette, the governor of Wisconsin, threatened to divide and undermine liberal leadership in the country when on April 28, he announced the formation of a third party, the National Progressives of America. Ickes, believing that the La Follette action would fall short and that no one else could step forward to lead liberalism, began urging Roosevelt to consider running again in 1940 in order to save progressive reform: “I told him that I loved him too much to wish such a thing on him,” Ickes said, but he saw no alternative. Roosevelt replied he didn’t want to run again but acknowledged the difficulty of finding someone to replace him. He went through a list of possible candidates and dismissed each one as not measuring up, but he wanted no public discussion of another term for himself, convinced it would do more harm than good. As he told Eleanor, “Any President is doubly cursed in his second term by discussion of the possibility of a third term.” He considered it a distraction that “keeps any President from doing his best work” and wanted it made clear that in 1938 and 1939 he would be thinking only about current troubles.
Between July 8 and July 14, when a conference Roosevelt had asked thirty-two countries to attend in France at Evian-les-Bains to find sanctuaries for Austrian and German Jews persecuted and abused by the Nazis arrived at no workable solutions, it deepened his sense of powerlessness. A critic of the proceedings complained that sympathetic pronouncements by its delegates were “a facade behind which the civilized governments could hide their inability to act.” An Intergovernmental committee set up to continue monitoring the refugee crisis was no more than a gesture devoid of anything resembling a solution.
Roosevelt fled Washington again for another sea voyage in the Pacific from July 17 to August 2. Of all his vacation cruises, one biographer wrote, this “was perhaps the one he most needed for relaxation, recreation, restoration of body and spirit. . . . He took with him no one who would tax him with weighty affairs of state.” In deference to his wishes, Roosevelt’s companions—Press Secretary Steve Early, White House physician Ross McIntire, former law partner Basil O’Connor, military aide Pa Watson, and Fred Adams, the son-in-law of Franklin’s uncle Warren Delano III—cheered him with their camaraderie and enthusiasm. Adams and O’Connor were “like children seeing the circus for the first time,” he told Daisy, and the fact that they “kept off politics by common consent” was an added delight. The absence of mail, except for radio messages, was a godsend. In one message to Marvin McIntyre at the White House, Roosevelt declared, “I take it you have a screamingly funny time over primaries! Here we don’t care who wins!”
But preceding the voyage, his trip across country to San Diego, where he again boarded the cruiser Houston, belied his claim. Banking on his personal popularity, he turned his train journey into a campaign for liberal Democrats most sympathetic to his reforms. In Maryland, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, and other states, he gave twenty-seven speeches promoting favored candidates, and where conservatives were running without an opponent, he made his small regard for them clear. In Kentucky, for example, he heaped praise on Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley, who had been an unqualified proponent of the president’s New Deal agenda, and faced a tough contest against the state’s governor, Albert B. (Happy) Chandler, whose election Roosevelt emphasized would hurt the party and administration by removing Barkley from the majority leadership. Likewise, Roosevelt warmly endorsed Oklahoma senator Elmer Thomas, an advocate of White House conservation projects, who was fighting for his political life. In supporting certain candidates, Roosevelt also effectively celebrated the gains of New Deal conservation measures that served the Southwest by preventing soil erosion, irrigating farms, ending floods, and developing waterpower. Like his cousin Theodore, he regarded conservation as an enduring concern that would form a key part of his legacy.
Along the way, whether in Texas, Colorado, or Nevada, Roosevelt snubbed conservative Democrats who had opposed his Court packing or shown themselves unsympathetic to other reforms. Because several of these senators and congressman, mindful of the president’s popularity, showed up at his appearances, Roosevelt pointedly ignored them or omitted to give them the customary mention in his talks. They were explicitly barred from being photographed with the president, and when possible he gave a shout-out to their opponents to embarrass his detractors. In Texas, for example, Roosevelt enraged Senator Tom Connally, a highly vocal foe of Court packing, by announcing an appointment to a federal judgeship of someone of whom Connally disapproved.
In addition to the appreciative crowds reinforcing his sense of satisfaction at remaining so popular after five and a half years in office, Roosevelt luxuriated in the scenic wonders of his July voyage. He sent Daisy a daily diary account of his activities and the natural wonders of the sky and islands as they proceeded along the coast of Baja California. “Tonight’s sunset,” he noted on the eighteenth, was “the most amazing I have ever seen.” An eight-mile run from their fishing site through rough waters back to the ship left them “soaked to the skin & tired in the right way.” He described places he had never seen before, marveled at islands far out to sea, “submerged mountains with only their tops showing.” The discoveries of Dr. Waldo Schmitt, a “delightful” Smithsonian naturalist, who collected previously unknown specimens, intrigued Roosevelt, who shared the scientist’s fascination with nature. When Schmitt discovered “a new variety of burrowing shrimp,” Roosevelt couldn’t resist a crack at Washington political opponents: “You & I know lots of shrimps—” he told Daisy “—tho their brain capacity was similar to the ones discovered today!” They sailed to the Galapagos, where he had the feeling of being in “the Pleistocene Period” with “the most ancient forms of animal life in the world—tortoises, iguanas etc. are the oldest living form of the animals of 15,000,000 years ago”
All too soon he was back on the West Coast of the United States and re-engaged with the primary fights. On his way back to Washington, he stopped in Georgia and South Carolina to campaign against two of his most formidable congressional opponents, senators Walter George and Ellison D. “Cotton Ed” Smith. At a speech in Barnesville, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, where he dedicated an REA facility, Roosevelt emphasized his attachment to the state through his fourteen-year residence in Warm Springs and his concern for the South. He reported the imminent appearance of a study citing the region’s enduring economic problems and his determination to use federal programs to relieve them, mentioning the successful New Deal initiative on rural electrification that his experience in Georgia had inspired. But his continuing to aid the South, he explained, depended on the cooperation of Congress, and for him to be able to do so, Georgians would have to end sixty-year-old senator Walter George’s fifteen-year Senate career and replace him with U.S. Attorney Lawrence Camp, a bona fide liberal. Roosevelt praised George as a gentleman and a scholar, as well as a friend, but despite his early support of the New Deal, including REA, TVA, AAA, and Social Security, in 1937 and 1938 George opposed the president’s court reform and the Wages and Hours law .
At a brief stop in Greenville in the northwest corner of South Carolina, Roosevelt made a less overt but no less forceful case against Smith in comments from the back of the train carrying him back to Washington. An outspoken tobacco-chewing racist who declared that “Cotton is king and white is supreme,” the sixty-seven-year-old Smith enjoyed only marginal popularity in South Carolina, where he had had several close run-off elections, which made him an inviting target for Roosevelt. Smith had served for twenty-nine years in the upper house, where he had alienated colleagues by calling the Senate “a cave of winds,” and represented the South’s old order of states’ rights and black repression. When a black minister gave a benediction at the 1936 Democratic convention, Smith walked out in protest and reported that John C. Calhoun had whispered to him from the great beyond that he had done good. His enduring objective, he told voters, was “to keep the Negro down and the price of cotton up.” In opposition to FSLA, he decried FDR’s minimum wage as an assault on free enterprise, adding that farmers in South Carolina could live on fifty cents a day. In his remarks at Greenville, Roosevelt again told the audience that he needed the cooperation of Congress to advance the interests of the South and alluded to the uncooperative Smith by declaring that no man or family could live on fifty cents a day.
On August 16, having returned to Washington, he told a press conference, “I cannot say I am glad to be back,” and continued his campaign against conservative Democrats. But first he took care to remind reporters of why they liked and admired him, telling them “I am glad to see you all again” and introducing them to Dan Callaghan, his new military aide. “He can look you all over and report to me afterwards what he thinks. I can tell him now that you improve on acquaintance,” he said to much laughter.
The main business of the day, though, was to resume his appeal for liberals in the primaries. He read a statement to the reporters that began with a defense of his “interference” in the elections, poking fun at the “Tory press” for decrying his meddling in such “sordid considerations.” But turning serious, he justified his intervention as essential to fulfilling promises he made in his reelection campaign, and as necessary to defeat the Democrats who gave “lip-service” to him and the New Deal in 1936 and then “turned around and knifed it in Congress in 1937 and 1938. Now that election time has come around again, the hidden opposition hides the ax behind its back and prepares to give the President lip-service once more.” Roosevelt said that he had no choice but to repudiate these turncoats. One he singled out was the fifty-eight-year-old Millard Tydings of Maryland, who had broken with the administration over its deficit spending and urged a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. “He wants to run with the Roosevelt prestige and the money of his conservative Republican friends both on his side,” Roosevelt said, so it was his “duty” to express his opinion of Tydings. He then turned to Representative John J. O’Connor from New York, “one of the most effective obstructionists in the Lower House,” who was devoted to tearing down the New Deal. The president concluded by telling the reporters that they were free to quote what he had said.
Roosevelt followed his press conference with additional efforts to influence primary outcomes. He wanted a Nebraska editorial praising his efforts to protect the New Deal read on a national radio broadcast; asked Breckinridge Long, an assistant secretary of state, to intervene in the Maryland primary, “both personally and financially”; and on Labor day, September 5, spent several hours in an open convertible on a two-hundred-mile drive along Maryland’s eastern shore promoting Representative David Lewis’s candidacy against Tydings. Despite cheering crowds along the way, a profusion of signs supporting Tydings raised doubts about the election’s outcome.
The results of the primaries proved to be a massive disappointment, and only in New York, where O’Connor went down to defeat, could Roosevelt take satisfaction from the voting. “Harvard lost the schedule but won the Yale game,” he told O’Connor’s successful opponent. But it provided little solace in light of the victories of George, Smith, Tydings, and other anti–New Deal Democrats in Colorado, Nevada, and Connecticut. The results confronted Roosevelt with the likelihood that any further progressive legislation would be unattainable. His “political fortunes [had] reached the lowest point of his presidency,” historian James MacGregor Burns wrote. “It takes a long, long time to bring the past up to the present,” Roosevelt said privately.
But personal and international concerns eclipsed his political frustrations. On September 11, his son James had surgery for ulcers at the Mayo Clinic. James’s illness had sparked tensions between Franklin and Eleanor, who had opposed James’s appointment as Franklin’s secretary after Louis Howe’s death, telling her husband that his decision to burden their oldest son with so heavy a responsibility “appalled” her. She believed that the tensions of the job had largely contributed to James’s illness, which doctors feared might be producing a life-threatening malignancy. Although tension may have contributed to James’s condition, more recent understanding of peptic ulcers points to a bacterial infection as a central cause of the condition, which painkillers such as aspirin may aggravate. But whatever the actual origins of his condition, the danger to James’s life was a source of distracting concern to both his parents, and led them to make a rushed trip to the Minnesota clinic and to face the prospect that James could no longer serve as his father’s White House chief of staff. Although James would make a rapid recovery from successful surgery and Roosevelt would be able to return to Washington on September 14, the additional likelihood that James would become the third of their children to suffer a failed marriage saddened both parents and burdened them with guilt regarding their children’s shortcomings or troubled personal relations.
Roosevelt lamented his duty to return to the White House rather than travel to Hyde Park, but “the situation in Europe is full of world dynamite,” as he told Daisy, “& I don’t dare be off the scene because it needs hourly watching.” A week later, on September 21, after returning to the Capital, he told her, “When I can leave, I don’t know ‘at all at all.’ Things are worse abroad & while a war does not mean us in it, it does change so many things—hate—all our ‘economics’—industry, agriculture, etc. And I go about these hectic days with a vile cold in my nose—nearly well every morning then comes up again in the P.M. Tomorrow I’m going to stay in bed.”
The source of Roosevelt’s anxiety was the Czech crisis, which involved Germany, Britain, and France. After his successful seizure of Austria in March 1938, Hitler had begun moving against Czechoslovakia as part of his plan to build a greater Reich. Specifically, he demanded Czechoslovakia’s cession of the Sudetenland, with its concentration of Volksdeutsch, or German-speaking citizens, whom Hitler falsely claimed were being oppressed by the Czechs. On September 12, in a speech before a Nazi Party Congress, he made demands for the Sudentenland’s “self-determination,” which put Europe on the edge of war—or so Roosevelt, who listened to the speech in his railway car parked in the Rochester train station, feared. He sensed the Führer’s determination, as he told his military chiefs, to make Czechoslovakia “disappear from the map.”
The widespread pacifist sentiment in the democracies, including the United States, encouraged Hitler’s willingness to bully them. University students across England had signed an Oxford Pledge not to fight in another war; the Women’s Strike for Peace in the United States, where gun manufacturers continued to be denounced as “merchants of death,” staged well-publicized marches; and 91 percent of Americans favored a ban on bombing civilians in any future conflict. Even in Germany, Colonel Hans Oster, a member of the counterintelligence corps who was convinced that Germany would lose if it fought Britain and France, organized a coup to strike against Hitler if he went to war. When Hitler did try to stir militancy among Berliners with a parade of motorized troops through the city, their “sullen” response amounted to what the American journalist William Shirer called “the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen.”
The fact that the British and French governments were encouraging the Czechs to reach a settlement with Berlin, including visits to Germany on September 15 and September 22 by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain to negotiate with Hitler, and a radio talk by Chamberlain in which he dismissed talk of war because of “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing,” convinced Hitler that, if need be, he could resort to military action without provoking a wider conflict. Despite bitter resistance among the Czechs to Nazi threats—Prague’s minister to London angrily remarked that Chamberlain had yet to learn that Czechoslovakia was a country and not a disease—the Czechs found themselves abandoned to Hitler’s demands.
As the crisis unfolded, Roosevelt deplored the peace-at-any-price attitude of the British and the French. He refused to respond to pressure from his ambassadors in London and Paris, Joseph Kennedy and William Bullitt, to prevent a war by pressing the Czechs to accommodate Hitler. The forty-seven-year-old Bullitt, the offspring of a prominent Philadelphia family and a Yale graduate, who had been Roosevelt’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union, despised Russia’s Communist government and saw Hitler as a bulwark against Soviet expansion across Europe. He urged the president to mediate the central European conflict, well aware that Roosevelt would then be accused of “selling out a small nation in order to produce another Hitler triumph,” but he believed it a price worth paying to preserve the peace.
Similarly, Kennedy, a prominent businessman who had contributed generously to Roosevelt’s campaigns and served as the first head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, had been sent to London to dispute Chamberlain’s policy. “I’d love to see the faces of those British aristocrats when this redheaded Irishman shows up in the Court of St. James,” Roosevelt remarked. But as they had for Bullitt, the Communists seemed more of a threat to Kennedy than the Nazis. When Kennedy proposed to make a speech announcing that there was nothing in the Czech situation “worth shedding blood for,” Roosevelt, who made him excise the statement, said, “Who would have thought that the English could take into camp a red-headed Irishman? The young man needs his wrist slapped rather hard.”
Roosevelt wanted to find ways to aid the British and French against Germany. He asked Morgenthau to develop a plan whereby London and Paris could deposit gold in the United States for use in purchasing arms and other war supplies. He considered the possibility of telling the German ambassador that if Hitler attacked Czechoslovakia, he would throw up barriers to continued trade with it. He secretly told the French ambassador, “You may count on us for everything except troops and loans.” When Chamberlain went to Germany for negotiations with Hitler, Roosevelt predicted that he and the French would assent to German aggression and then “wash the blood from their Judas Iscariot hands.” After warning the British ambassador that the Czechs were being asked to make “the most terrible remorseless sacrifice,” Roosevelt told him that if he revealed what he was about to say, it could threaten him with impeachment. He then outlined a plan for helping fight Germany, predicted that the Czechs would not give in, and if they did, other German demands would surely follow, involving “Denmark, the Polish Corridor or most likely of all a dangerous and forcible economic or physical penetration through Romania.” He also expected that “somehow or other” the United States would eventually be drawn into the fighting.
Because Roosevelt viewed the British and the French as poorly prepared to compete with Germany on the battlefield, he decided to call upon all the powers to maintain the peace. In public messages to the contending countries on September 26, Roosevelt urged them “for the sake of humanity everywhere” not to go to war. The consequences of a conflict, he declared, would claim millions of lives “under circumstances of unspeakable horror. The economic system of every country involved may well be completely wrecked.” He doubted, however, that his message would have any impact, and when he heard Hitler speak on the same day, it only deepened his despair. “Did you hear Hitler today?” he asked Daisy. “His shrieks, his histrionics and the effect on the huge audience—They did not applaud—they made noises like animals.” William Shirer, who attended Hitler’s speech, thought the German leader was “in the worst state of excitement I’ve ever seen him in.” Despite Hitler’s histrionics, or because of them, Roosevelt sent him another plea on September 27 for a peaceful resolution of the crisis. The following day, when Hitler announced that he was inviting Mussolini, Chamberlain, and French premier Edouard Daladier to meet with him in Munich, Roosevelt told Daisy, “Could anything bring a more perfect morning!—It is too early to tell but it looks like no war.”
The settlement at Munich two days later on September 30 was a capitulation to Hitler and became famous as the hallmark of “appeasement,” ceding Czechoslovakia to him. While it relieved immediate tensions and bought what Chamberlain described as “peace in our time,” as Winston Churchill foresaw in a speech to the House of Commons, “You chose dishonor and you will have war.”
Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt had the slightest trust in Hitler’s protestations that the Czech settlement represented his last demand. In Parliament, in October, Churchill called the agreement with Hitler a “total and unmitigated defeat.” It was the height of nonsense, he said, for Hitler, who had not shown the slightest tolerance for dissenting opinions and other creeds, to demand self-determination for the Sudeten Germans. It was only a matter of time, Churchill predicted, before Hitler would dismantle the entire Czech state, and Britain, which had a recent history of taking “the line of least resistance . . . five years of uninterrupted retreat of British power” and of inexcusable neglect of its air defenses, would find itself at the mercy of Nazi aggression. Britain, Churchill added, had been reduced from a position “safe and unchallenged” to one of wretched vulnerability, which represented “a disaster of the first magnitude.” The transparent threat was from a merciless Nazi Germany, which, animated by “a barbarous paganism” and “the threat of murderous force,” was an unqualified opponent of British democracy. The nation’s only recourse now, he urged, was to hasten a program of rearmament beginning with the building of unprecedented air defenses to protect the British Isles.
Whether Roosevelt read Churchill’s speech is unknown, but it is clear that he shared Churchill’s concern. While he celebrated the peaceful resolution of the Czech crisis, wiring Chamberlain, “Good man,” and saw no immediate threat to the United States comparable to what Britain and France faced, he was determined to expand America’s defensive capacity beyond what most in an isolationist America considered essential. “The dictator threat from Europe is a good deal closer to the United States and the American Continent than it was before,” he told his ambassador in Lisbon. The possibility of Germany establishing air bases in the Western Hemisphere, which could threaten attacks on the United States, haunted him. He told Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King, “I am still concerned . . . when we consider prospects for the future. I cannot help but feel that unless very soon Europe as a whole takes up important changes in two companion directions—reduction of armaments and lowering of trade barriers—a new crisis will occur.” To make it clear to Fascist aggressors where America stood in any future confrontation with Britain, Roosevelt urged King George to make a formal visit to the United States in 1939 after visiting Canada.
In an October 26 radio address to the Herald Tribune Forum, Roosevelt condemned Hitler’s threat of war, his use of “economic resources that ought to be devoted to social and economic reconstruction . . . to an intensified competition in armaments”; his repression of free speech; and his “dispersion all over the world of millions of helpless and persecuted wanderers with no place to lay their heads.” Roosevelt added, while Americans refuse “to accept as a permanent necessity the idea of force and reject it as an ideal of life, we must be prepared to meet with success any application of force against us.” Without a “general abandonment of weapons capable of aggression, ordinary rules of national prudence and common sense require that we be prepared.”
Roosevelt gave substance to his concern about American preparedness in secret conversations with military leaders. In November he told Josephus Daniels that he was working on two initiatives, the foremost being “national defense, especially mass production of planes.” On November 11, Armistice Day, General John J. Pershing, commander of U.S. forces in the First World War, had discussed with Roosevelt the country’s “military necessities in the light of the present European situation.” He endorsed the idea of “large additions to our present air force” and agreed with the view that they needed a quick response to “tremendous increases in the production of what the Government requires. . . . If we are to be prepared to extend a long and powerful air arm to the southward, we must have instantly available the means to maintain that air activity by establishing the necessary advance bases.” Pershing shared Roosevelt’s fear of possible Nazi airfields in South America and also saw a compelling need to address the deficiencies in equipment of U.S. ground forces. It was imperative that they not repeat the experience of World War I, when “we were literally beggars as to every important weapon, except the rifle.”
Troubled by reports of German advantages over Britain and France in air power, Roosevelt was determined to right the balance. Bullitt told him that France’s air force was only 10 percent the size of Hitler’s and lacked a single plane that could pose an attack against the Germans. By contrast, Germany could “bomb Paris at will” and threaten “the whole future of freedom in the world.” Roosevelt publicly announced an increase in arms spending of $800 million, while behind the scenes, he approved a French purchasing mission to the United States and endorsed the building of aircraft assembly plants in Canada, where the neutrality law would not apply to the manufacture of five thousand planes a year for France in the event of war. At the same time, he wanted a significant increase in airplane production in the United States to at least fifteen thousand a year. Army chief of staff General Malin Craig asked: “What are we going to do with fifteen thousand planes? Who [are] you going to fight, what [are] you going to do with them, with three thousand miles of ocean?” When the military recommended a more balanced expansion of forces, Roosevelt protested, arguing, “A well-rounded ground army of even 400,000 could not be considered a deterrent for any foreign power whereas a heavy striking force of aircraft would.” He told them that Germany and Italy had a combined ten thousand planes—three times the capacity of the British and the French—and could produce fourteen thousand more a year. Roosevelt wanted at least a ten-thousand–plane U.S. air force and the ability to build as many as twenty thousand more a year, part of which would be sold to Britain and France. Because he could not imagine gaining public support for sending a large army abroad, America’s defense had to be based on its air and naval power and that of democratic allies.
Because no one actually had precise information on the size and scope of German and Italian air forces—existing estimates had in fact vastly exaggerated the Fascist advantage—and U.S. military leadership saw no likelihood of an air assault on the homeland, they continued to resist Roosevelt’s investment of defense funds largely in air power. However, they did share his concerns about Fascist penetration of Latin America, where the Germans and Italians had been busy promoting their influence with arms sales, military missions, propaganda, trade deals, and other forms of economic penetration.
Roosevelt was also determined to build up the Navy as quickly as possible as a deterrent to Nazi expansion in the Atlantic and Caribbean, but also as a response to Japan’s Pacific ambitions. A report in December on the progress of naval construction moved him to instruct the Navy secretary to speed up the production of destroyers. The customary practice of giving priority to repairs on ships in Navy yards over the building of new vessels was delaying the completion of new destroyers by many months. “It is absolutely contrary to the best interest of the Navy,” Roosevelt told the secretary, and ordered it to be stopped.
In November, nothing added to Roosevelt’s worries about a European outbreak more than events in Germany on November 9 and November 10, which came to be known as Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), or the night of the broken glass. The alleged trigger of the pogrom was the assassination in Paris of Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official, by Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish-Jewish student, in retaliation for Nazi anti-Semitism. “The night of horror,” Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw says, “a retreat in a modern state to the savagery associated with bygone ages, laid bare to the world the barbarism of the Nazi regime.” In cities across Germany, Nazi Party activists attacked Jewish houses of worship, businesses, and other places with any sort of Jewish identity and killed as many as one hundred unarmed civilians. The exclusion of Jews from many forms of economic activity, as well as the confiscation of Jewish property and wealth, followed the night of violence as part of the “aryanization” of German life, and further reduced the likelihood of Jewish survival in Germany. The all-out campaign to rid Germany of its Jews was a product of Nazi ideology’s belief that they were a menace to the nation’s survival and prosperity. The Jews soon became the object of a mass paranoia that would spread across Europe and become ever more lethal over the next seven years.
Roosevelt regarded Kristallnacht as further evidence of German ruthlessness and readiness to resort to force in its dealings with its Jewish minority and with any country that dared to stand in the way of its expansionist ambitions. “What a plight the unfortunate Jews are in,” Roosevelt said in September about their persecution in Italy, where Mussolini issued decrees expelling all post-1919 Jewish migrants and barring them, as in Germany, from participation in the country’s economic life. “It gives them little comfort to remind them that they have been ‘on the run’ for about four thousand years.” After the pogrom ended, Roosevelt told a press conference, “The news of the past few days has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States. . . . I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.” He issued a formal protest by recalling the American ambassador from Berlin and did not send him back in the coming year.
While withdrawing the ambassador was largely a symbolic gesture, it took on greater resonance when no other country followed suit. Still, Roosevelt wouldn’t go beyond that and issue a direct expression of protest to Berlin, even though TR had created a precedent for such a response in 1903 and 1906 when he sent diplomatic notes to the Russian government decrying its pogroms. When reporters asked Roosevelt if there were any plans to help those fleeing Germany, he replied that the International Refugee Commission was “at work trying to extend its help to take care of an increasingly difficult situation” and added, “I have given a great deal of thought to it.” He was also asked: “Can you tell us any place particularly desirable” where Jews might be welcomed? “No,” Roosevelt answered, “the time is not ripe for that.” He had, in any case, to honor the quotas allowed under the 1924 National Origins Act. Because the German quota had not been filled, he combined it with the Austrian allowance and permitted some of the 190,000 Jews displaced by the Anschluss to come to the United States. Even so, only 27,000 refugees could find their way to America under this arrangement. Roosevelt also extended the amount of time some 15,000 Austrian and German visitors to the United States could remain in the country, calling it “cruel and inhuman to compel them to leave here.”
There is no doubt, as the former League of Nations high commissioner James McDonald recorded, that Roosevelt was in search of an answer to Jewish persecution, including considerations of rescuing millions of Europe’s Jews from the Nazis by bringing them to ten democratic countries. He asked Isaiah Bowman, a political geographer, president of Johns Hopkins University, and former member of the U.S. delegation to the Versailles conference, to advise him on potential areas for settling displaced Jews. Moreover, Roosevelt was under some pressure from Eleanor to respond to the issue. She told Franklin that “the German-Jewish business makes me sick.” Roosevelt shared her sense of outrage. Earlier that year, at a White House meeting of interfaith leaders he had held to discuss refugees, Roosevelt described Hitler as “a maniac with a mission.” Eleanor’s rejection of racial and religious intolerance registered most clearly in November at a Southern Conference on Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama, where she resisted segregation statutes by refusing to sit in an all-white section of the city’s auditorium. In a Gallup poll, 67 percent approved of her actions as a model of democratic tolerance.
Mindful of the anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States and the anti-Semitism that was all too evident in the State Department among its conservative career officers, however, Roosevelt muted his objections to Nazi discrimination against Germany’s Jews. His defeats in the Court packing fight, the Democratic primaries, and the congressional elections; public resistance in the United States to involvement in overseas conflicts; and transparent opposition in other countries to relaxing immigration barriers—especially in Latin America, partly fueled by fears of job competition in a tight employment market—combined to discourage Roosevelt’s humanitarian impulses. The reluctance of other world leaders to take on rescue initiatives left Roosevelt largely isolated in attempting to deal with the refugee crisis, and Joseph Kennedy’s collaboration with Prime Minister Chamberlain in opposing actions that they believed would antagonize Hitler especially troubled him.
Although 94 percent of Americans disapproved of Nazi persecution of the Jews, 61 percent favored a boycott of German goods, 83 percent said they hoped Russia would defeat Germany if they fought a war, and 83 percent opposed increasing quotas allowing more European immigrants into the United States. When Ickes spoke up at a cabinet meeting for opening “our doors to political refugees,” Vice President Garner responded that if Congress could hold a secret vote, “all immigration would be stopped.” Likewise, isolationism continued to stand in the way of unqualified support for building the country’s defenses against external threats. To be sure, large majorities favored expanding the Army and Navy, but they also opposed universal military training for twenty-year-olds. A standing American army might make it easier to draw the United States into a foreign conflict, or so millions of Americans believed.
If all the news from abroad wasn’t enough to darken Roosevelt’s days, the results of the November congressional elections gave him added pause, as the Democrats suffered their worst reverses since 1930. The Republicans nearly doubled their seats in the House from 88 to 169, increased their numbers in the Senate by eight to 23, and captured 13 governorships. Josephus Daniels saw the results as “unexpected and depressing,” and with the Southern conservative Democrats remaining as opposed to the administration as ever, prospects for congressional cooperation seemed dim. Roosevelt blamed the defeats on “our officeholders and our candidates [who] had not measured up.” Jim Farley believed they were the result of “hostility to the spending program, the fear that the C[ongress] of I[ndustrial] O[rganizations] exercised undue influence within the administration . . . low farm prices, dissatisfaction with the W.P.A., and business discontent with regimentation.”
Ever the optimist, Roosevelt put the best possible face on the defeat. “I am not wholly reconciled to last Tuesday’s results,” he told Daniels, “but I believe that they are on the whole helpful. We have eliminated certain individuals and certain inter-party fights which were doing positive harm.” Losses in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania remedied “some bad local situations.” Moreover, the elections had removed “Phil LaFollette and the Farmer Labor people in the Northwest as a standing Third Party threat. They must and will come to us if we remain definitely the liberal party.” He expected the next Congress to be “less trouble” than the previous one. Conservative Democrats would understand that they could not control the 1940 Democratic convention without administration support and would know that Roosevelt would not back any of their number for the presidential nomination. In addition, he urged Farley to organize “a special division of the National Committee to begin giving the incumbents [new Republican governors] the ‘works’ as soon as they take office.” He was certain that they “will slide back to reactionary policies that would make them vulnerable.” He saw at least eleven eastern, midwestern, and western states, where “hardships of various types” would be the norm “under these new regimes” and make them vulnerable targets for Democratic attacks.
On December 5, on his way back to Washington from a Thanksgiving holiday in Warm Springs, Roosevelt stopped at the University of North Carolina, a “representative of liberal teaching and liberal thought,” to give a speech. “It is my recognition of your recognition of that [liberal] philosophy that brings me so willingly to Chapel Hill,” he told the crowd. He praised the university’s affinity for “thinking and acting in terms of today and tomorrow and not merely in the tradition of yesterday.” He reminded the thousands of students and faculty, who made up an attentive audience, that “it is not progress, but the reverse, when a nation goes through the madness of the twenties” that brought on the Great Depression. He chided “unthinking liberals . . . who see nothing but tragedy in the slowing up or temporary stopping of liberal progress” and “unthinking conservatives who rejoice down in their hearts when a social or economic reform fails to be 100 percent successful.”
He had two pieces of advice for the undergraduates assembled before him. First, for those who were seeing him for the first time and had been told by the mass media that he was “an ogre—a consorter with Communists, a destroyer of the rich, a breaker of our ancient traditions. . . . You have heard for six years that I was about to plunge the Nation into war; that you and your little brothers would be sent to the bloody fields of battle in Europe; that I was driving the Nation into bankruptcy and that I breakfasted every morning on a dish of grilled millionaire. Actually,” he declared to peals of laughter, “I am an exceedingly mild mannered person—a practitioner of peace, both domestic and foreign, a believer in the capitalistic system, and for breakfast a devotee of scrambled eggs.” Second, he cautioned the students against believing that the results of the recent elections meant that “the liberal forces in the United States are on their way to the cemetery—yet I ask you to remember that liberal forces in the United States have often been killed and buried, with the inevitable result that in short order they have come to life again with more strength than they had before.”
To give credence to his avowed continuing liberal commitments, on December 24, Roosevelt replaced Dan Roper, a conservative Democrat, with the consummate New Dealer Harry Hopkins as secretary of commerce. After Hopkins was alleged to have said, “We will tax and tax and spend and spend and elect and elect,” the conservative press declared, “Surely, this is the most incomprehensible, as well as one of the least defensible, appointments the President has made in his six and one-half years in the White House.” Personally attached to Hopkins, the president also saw him as a “stalking horse” to ensure that Roosevelt or another liberal would receive the 1940 presidential nomination.
Roosevelt believed that Republican and conservative Democratic gains in 1938 would renew the antagonisms that had been prevalent in 1930–32, which eventually led to losing their hold on voters. He expected a rekindled enthusiasm for liberal measures that would serve New Deal advocates in 1940. But circumstances had changed, and the battles in 1939 and beyond would not be over conservative or liberal policies at home, but the most prudent response to tumultuous events abroad, and these were not grounds on which liberal Democrats could be confident of victories.