◆ The president as the government—and vice versa

No doubt about it, Herbert Hoover was a very unpopular man, the first four years of economic depression coinciding almost exactly with the four years of his presidency. Probably any Democrat would have defeated him. But the margin of the Roosevelt electoral victory—472 to 59—suggested something more. Franklin Roosevelt had a mandate.

The Mandate Presidency

Franklin Roosevelt was the first president to be ushered into office with a mandate to do virtually whatever he thought necessary to rescue the country from the crisis of the Great Depression. On this basis, Roosevelt built an extraordinary presidency, assuming a range of powers unheard of in peacetime.

def•i•ni•tion

In presidential politics, a mandate is a command or authorization by voters to make good on a campaign pledge; the presence of a mandate is defined by a decisive margin of victory at the polls.

Redefining the Role of Government

Although Roosevelt intended to take steps toward eventual economic recovery, the program he presented to voters emphasized immediate rescue and relief rather than abstract financial policy. To establish the popular basis for a mandate, FDR set about redefining the very scope of the nation’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He persuaded a majority of the electorate that it was the job of modern government to defend economic welfare as an “unalienable right” on a par with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Redefining Americanism

Herbert Hoover had invoked the universally accepted American tradition of self-reliance as a reason for refraining from using federal resources to directly assist individuals. This was an example of the moral leadership Hoover believed was one of the president’s most important duties.

Roosevelt also exercised moral leadership, but argued that self-reliance had to be reevaluated in the light of a crisis in which individualism had to give way to working for the common good. Yes, people would have to make sacrifices as individuals, but the government would be there to provide direct help and direct support. In addition, the government would provide a means of sustaining the individual by weaving a social and economic safety net to prevent people from falling into the worst poverty, and that would keep the free market from total collapse. In short, Roosevelt intended to create a welfare state.

def•i•ni•tion

A welfare state is a nation in which the government assumes primary responsibility for the health care, social security, education, and general economic well-being of its citizens.

Redefining the Presidency

Roosevelt’s formidable task was to acquire and wield the executive power necessary to create and administer this novel and distasteful role for American government.

The American president would have to be both a powerful administrator, taking on a legislative role, as well as a highly persuasive popular leader. To achieve this, FDR harked back to his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, and the presidential theory he had espoused, that the chief duty of a president was to be the steward of the public welfare. Like T. R., FDR defined himself as the direct representative of the people, the principal agent of democratic government over and above both the legislative and judicial branches and, even more important, over and above the party.

Crisis and Power

Americans saw in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere the meteoric rise of strongman dictators, and many began to doubt the capacity of democratic capitalism to survive let alone overcome the Great Depression. Perhaps it was best to sacrifice freedom and put the national destiny in the hands of a single empowered leader.

Franklin Roosevelt was prepared to exploit the economic crisis as well as the international milieu to acquire unprecedented power. To be sure, FDR was no Hitler or Mussolini, but if these avatars of dictatorial leadership had not existed, it would have been more difficult for the new president to take charge as he did.

Like the dictators, Roosevelt created about himself—albeit to a limited degree—a cult of personality. Wilson’s approach to Congress as a “human being” rather than as a “department” of government (see Chapter 16) was a bold step toward a personal presidency—and one from which Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover retreated. FDR embraced the concept of personal government. He wanted the people to see him as their leader, a human being in whom they could place their full confidence.

The New Deal: Institutionalizing the Extraordinary

Roosevelt understood that popular confidence was only a means to an end, a way to alter the national mood in order to win acceptance of a powerful presidency. To legalize that presidency, he knew that he would have to move more than the people. He needed to move the government itself.

Government by Executive Order

He did this by issuing a cascade of executive orders. In an emergency, FDR reasoned, legislation was too slow and too diffuse in fixing responsibility for government.

Orders issued directly from the White House, however, were immediate and concentrated the action in the hands of a single leader. The president became not only the most powerful officer of government, but the one on whose shoulders the people were invited to place their burdens.

Speed was essential—not just to limit economic damage (as in the Bank Holiday, proclaimed during FDR’s second day in office and intended to halt the rash of runs that were causing banks to fail nationwide), but also to show the people that democratic government was neither impotent nor unresponsive.

What They Said

I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. —Franklin D. Roosevelt, speech accepting the nomination for president, July 2, 1932

The Hundred Days

The problem with speed is that it is easily perceived as panic. Roosevelt packaged speed in a unique program on which he and his advisers unabashedly affixed a brand name: the “Hundred Days.”

Bundling everything under the Hundred Days rubric would create its own momentum. FDR’s executive orders were quickly augmented by congressional legislation, which, swept along by the tide of presidential action, also proceeded at a remarkable pace.

Creating Belief

The greatest presidents were always creators of belief. For FDR and his inner circle, the New Deal was no mere set of executive orders and laws, but a secular religion that would bring salvation to the nation. True believers were christened “New Dealers,” and adhering to the precepts of the program was considered an act of another form of secular religion, patriotism.

In an age dominated by compelling symbols—it can be reasonably argued that the Nazi swastika was the most universally recognized symbol since the Christian cross—New Deal culture was rife with them. Businesses of every kind showed their support of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) by displaying a stylized black eagle NRA decal or placard prominently in their shops and offices and imprinting it on stationery and advertisements. Every public office—federal, state, and local—and many private offices and homes proudly hung portraits of President Roosevelt himself on the wall. In school classrooms, his image jockeyed for space with those of Washington and Lincoln.

The Image Presidency

Image has long played an important, if sporadic, role in the American presidency. For example, Andrew Jackson was “Old Hickory” the frontiersman, and William Henry Harrison and Abraham Lincoln were both “log cabin” presidents (see Chapters 8, 9, and 11, respectively). In FDR, however, the image presidency was raised to a new height.

Not only were portraits of the president ubiquitous, newspaper coverage displayed his buoyant smile, with his trademark cigarette holder clamped between his teeth at a jaunty, upturned angle. He exuded an optimism, which was amplified in his speaking style—always straight talking, never turning away from harsh reality, yet invariably affirmative.

In 1921, Roosevelt was stricken by a paralytic disease long assumed to have been polio but recently rediagnosed as Guillain-Barré syndrome, another disorder that attacks the central nervous system. The disease left Roosevelt a paraplegic, yet throughout his post-1921 career, both as New York governor and as president, FDR was careful to avoid being photographed in a wheelchair, even though he used one extensively in private. In public, he stood and even walked short distances with the aid of massive steel braces concealed under his trouser legs. Not only did he believe that neither the American people nor other world leaders would accept a wheelchair-bound chief executive, his ability to stand on his own two feet conveyed a positive message, implying that if the paralyzed president could overcome his disability, so could a nation stricken by economic paralysis.

The Speech as an Event

President Roosevelt was an eloquent speaker, who wrote his own speeches and also employed distinguished professional speechwriters, including the playwright and poet Archibald MacLeish (who served as librarian of Congress in the Roosevelt administration) and four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway playwright Robert Sherwood. FDR combined a fresh, personal style, often laced with down-to-earth figures of speech, with a trace of the genuinely poetic to create public messages of great persuasive and inspirational power.

What They Said

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. —Franklin D. Roosevelt, first inaugural address, March 4, 1933

The Fireside Chat

Counterpointed to the sheer velocity of executive orders and the formal eloquence of public speeches was the most celebrated of the FDR innovations in presidential communication, the fireside chat. As New York governor, Roosevelt had used the radio to make informal talks directly to the public. At the end of his first week as president of the United States, on Sunday, March 12, 1933, he delivered his first radio talk from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House. He would make 26 more in the course of his presidency. It was CBS executive Harry C. Butcher, at the time of the second broadcast (May 7, 1933), who coined the term “fireside chat.”

What They Said

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. —Franklin D. Roosevelt, second inaugural address, January 20, 1937

FDR understood that radio was an intimate medium that literally brought personalities into the family parlor and therefore, provided a unique opportunity to create a direct relationship between the president and the people—or rather, between the president and each person who heard the broadcast. Roosevelt used the fireside chat format to speak on a single issue of pressing importance for 15 to 30 minutes. The fireside chat addressed each person individually, but reached a huge radio audience.

The First Lady

Most of the first ladies who had preceded Eleanor Roosevelt had either been largely invisible or had functioned primarily as the lady of the White House, the nation’s “first hostess.” Before she entered the White House with her husband in 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt had already built a reputation as a social activist and reformer. She used her position as first lady to broaden this work, often in coordination with the New Deal and other FDR Depression-era relief programs. She was also an advocate of social and political progressivism, including the cause of racial equality. As much as FDR transformed the presidency, Eleanor Roosevelt transformed the role of first lady, elevating it to a position of quasi-official responsibility. Some, though not all, subsequent first ladies followed the precedent she had created—though none has yet achieved the remarkable scope of her activities and impact.

Pushing the Constitutional Envelope

The social programs of the New Deal that transformed American government and life were so closely associated with Roosevelt that Americans became accustomed to thinking of the president as the government, and vice versa. This perception made it easier for the people to accept the very serious challenges the FDR social agenda posed to the Constitution. Roosevelt claimed that he, as president, functioned only as “the agency” through which “certain of the purposes of Congress” were carried out.

Many others, however, believed that his radical use of the executive office usurped the proper role of Congress and was nothing less than an assault on the balance of powers.

Among these skeptics was a majority of the Supreme Court, which ruled unconstitutional a number of New Deal laws. Fearful that the centerpiece of the New Deal, the Social Security Act, would fall, Roosevelt attempted to bring the judicial branch under the control of the executive by sending to Congress early in 1937 his so-called “court-packing bill,” which obliged the president to appoint a new Supreme Court justice for every sitting justice who did not retire by age 70. Because six of the nine sitting justices were 70 or older, FDR would be empowered to increase membership on the court to 15, populating it with justices amenable to Social Security and other items of New Deal legislation.

Congress voted down the “court-packing bill,” but the president’s boldness in even having proposed it may have had the desired effect after all. The Supreme Court never again struck down another New Deal law.

Foreign Affairs: New Vistas from the White House

Roosevelt’s first two terms were mostly taken up with the domestic economic crisis. By the end of the second term, foreign affairs became an increasingly critical concern as war clouds darkened Europe and Asia.

It was one thing to convert the American people, suffering under a failing economy, to the idea of creating a welfare state administered chiefly by the president, but it was quite another to move these same people away from the isolationism of three Republican presidencies. With the rise of Mussolini and Hitler in Europe and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, President Roosevelt began educating the public to the dangers of the world situation in an effort to persuade them that, in the next world war, the United States could not remain isolated, even if it wanted to.

The president’s early efforts to move the nation toward engagement with the rest of the world met with considerable resistance from Congress. In response to this, Roosevelt increasingly assumed unilateral control over foreign policy. Whereas even Woodrow Wilson had taken care to build a congressional consensus before edging

America into war, Roosevelt took it entirely upon himself to choose sides, beginning with the implementation of embargos to halt the export of U.S.-made weapons to nations he deemed dangerous. When a 1936 embargo was challenged in the Supreme Court, the justices ruled in favor of the president, in effect ratifying what some earlier presidents had merely asserted: that the chief executive is the supreme authority in the conduct of foreign policy.

After the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939, Roosevelt used his court-bolstered authority to gradually align the United States with the Allied powers—especially Great Britain—who struggled to stem the tide of Nazi invasion. On September 2, 1940, the administration concluded a destroyers-for-bases deal with Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, whereby the U.S. Navy would “lend” 50 obsolescent World War I-vintage destroyers—which the Royal Navy desperately needed as convoy escorts—in return for leases on British naval bases in the Caribbean. This program, carried out entirely by executive order, paved the way for the far more dramatic Lend Lease Act (March 11, 1941), which required congressional legislation to appropriate necessary funds. Through lend lease, Congress authorized the president to furnish material to any nation whose security he deemed essential to that of the United States and to supply these items on any basis the president saw fit, whether for cash payment, on credit, on exchange, or simply as a grant or loan.

Personal Diplomacy

In the unique relationship he forged with Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated an unprecedented era of personal diplomacy. Never before had an American president entered into an intimate partnership with another world leader. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, thrust America into the war, Roosevelt and Churchill (and, to a much lesser extent, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin) closely collaborated on strategy and war policy.

Never again would an American president work so intimately with other world leaders; however, the Roosevelt-Churchill example has served as both precedent and model for subsequent person-to-person diplomacy at a presidential level. Facilitated by modern communications technology and speedy international travel, every president since Roosevelt has assumed a great deal of direct responsibility for international negotiations and agreements, even as the direct role of ambassadors and the secretary of state has diminished.

White House Diplomacy

As President Roosevelt transformed diplomacy into a matter of personal partnership, so he tended to bring all aspects of foreign policy into the White House itself. Functions traditionally performed by the Department of State and overseen by the secretary of state were increasingly assumed by non-cabinet-level presidential advisers, such as former social worker and New Deal administrator Harry Hopkins and other more-or-less informal confidants who passed in and out of the president’s inner circle. The consolidation of foreign affairs in the White House would become a common feature of all the postwar presidencies.

War Powers

Ever since Abraham Lincoln, American presidents have assumed extraordinary powers in war. Like President Wilson before him, FDR extended executive authority over wartime domestic economic and social affairs, including matters of war production, allocation of resources, and rationing, and the institution of special regulations to prevent espionage and sabotage, including the establishment of secret military tribunals.

The most egregious domestic war power FDR exercised was the removal of some 100,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese descent from their homes and businesses along the West Coast to “relocation camps” located inland. This mass dispossession and internment was instituted on February 8, 1942, by executive order, without congressional action (although members of Congress overwhelmingly approved of the action). When challenged in the Supreme Court, the legality of this unprecedented affront to the Fifth Amendment was upheld on the grounds of “military necessity.”

President Roosevelt did not confine his hands-on conduct of the war to managing domestic policy. To a degree not seen since Lincoln and the Civil War, FDR assumed the role of commander in chief, taking ultimate responsibility for formulating broad U.S. military strategy and priorities, albeit always in consultation with Churchill and (to a lesser degree) Stalin.

Roosevelt frequently met with his top military advisers as well as with high-level operational commanders. Although he usually deferred to them, he took pains to demonstrate to the American people and the rest of the world that he was the ultimate war leader of the United States—just as Churchill and Stalin were the war leaders of their countries, and, for that matter, much as Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo were the commanders in chief of German, Italian, and Japanese forces.

Tally

In the 1932 election, Roosevelt received 22,821,857 popular votes (57 percent) to Herbert Hoover’s 15,761,841 (40 percent). The electoral tally was 472 to 59. In 1936, the landslide was even greater, Roosevelt polling 27,751,597 votes (61 percent) to Alf Landon’s 16,679,583 (37 percent). The electoral victory was 523 to 8. The Roosevelt third-term victory in 1940 was narrower, but still substantial: 27,243,466 (55 percent) to Wendell Wilkie’s 22,304,755 (45 percent). The electoral vote was 449 to 82. Roosevelt won a fourth term by an even narrower margin, but, again, still a solid majority, polling 25,602,505 (53 percent) votes to the 22,006,278 (46 percent) of Thomas E. Dewey. Roosevelt earned 432 electoral votes to Dewey’s 99.

Breaking the Two-Term Tradition

As breathtaking as Roosevelt’s expansion of the presidency was in the areas of financial and social policy and foreign affairs, nothing was more precedent shattering than his decision to break the hitherto sacrosanct tradition of the two-term presidency by running for a third and a fourth term. That FDR was elected four times is a testament both to his popular success as a president and to the gravity of the emergencies that confronted the nation—a catastrophic depression followed by a cataclysmic world war. But not only did the example of FDR fail to permanently undo the two-term limit, it prompted Congress to enshrine that tradition in a constitutional amendment, the Twenty-Second, ratified in 1951. The American people were grateful to Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom most historians rank as the greatest president of the twentieth century, but they did not want to leave open the possibility that some future president would transform himself into what the Democratic-Republicans had most feared back in the days of Washington and Adams: a republican monarch.

The Least You Need to Know

◆ The first mandate president, Roosevelt enduringly identified the president as the government—and vice versa.

◆ Roosevelt saw the president not as a caretaker of government, but as an agent of necessary change, which was embodied in a bold package of social and economic legislation.

◆ Like Lincoln and Wilson before him, President Roosevelt amassed for the presidency a wide range of war powers.