Chapter Twenty-two
The Perfect Foil
HERBERT HOOVER HADN’T CAUGHT A BREAK ALL YEAR. After his defeat in November, he went to Florida for vacation and as he boarded the train at West Palm Beach to return, the band leader on the platform gave a signal and the band struck up FDR’s theme song, “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
Franklin Roosevelt knew show business and knew he had, in vaudeville terms, “an easy act to follow.” From his November election through his March Inauguration, Roosevelt used Hoover as a foil. He let the outgoing president hang himself—and the American economy—so that he could enter stage left as a hero. It’s not that FDR could have ended the impending crisis; he didn’t have power yet. And he certainly didn’t like to see suffering. But he understood that the lower Hoover and the country slid, the better he would look upon assuming office. This theatrical and psychological insight was essential to his conjuring act when he finally took the oath.
The cordial relationship between Roosevelt and Hoover had ended during the 1928 presidential campaign, when a close friend of Hoover, Julius Barnes, the outspoken chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, passed along to Hoover a form letter FDR had written on behalf of Al Smith. It attacked the Republicans for their “materialism,” which Hoover took as a personal affront he could never forgive.*
By the end of 1932, Hoover’s views about Roosevelt had hardened further. He believed the economic paralysis the country experienced that winter was the direct result of his loss to FDR. He was at least partly right. If Roosevelt’s election did not by itself halt recovery, it clearly contributed to a period of drift that worsened a grim economic situation. Uncertainty over what the new president might do shook confidence. The following year, FDR’s agriculture secretary, Henry Wallace, concluded in an economic report that the economy had been recovering slightly in the fall of 1932, but that the “long interval” between the election and the Inauguration “proved unsettling to business” and was an important factor in impeding recovery.
The winter of 1932–33 was the last such “long interval” between the November election and the Inauguration on March 4, the day every president since George Washington had been sworn in. It was by far the worst such “interregnum,” with the possible exception of 1860–61, on the eve of the Civil War. The uncertainty was excruciating. “By March 4 next we may have anything on our hands from recovery to revolution,” Berle told FDR. “The chance is about even either way.”
The awful economic conditions and long wait for Roosevelt were not, contrary to popular assumption, the reason all future inaugurations were moved up to January 20. For a decade, Nebraska senator George Norris, a Progressive Republican, had tried to move a constitutional amendment through Congress that would curtail its lame duck sessions (which Norris believed were subject to domination by special interests) and shorten the presidential transitions. He finally succeeded in early 1932. But with the time necessary for ratification by the states, the new Twentieth Amendment would not be effective until the election of 1936. It would have changed history had Norris prevailed earlier.
If a rambunctious Roosevelt had had his way, he would have broken all precedent and been sworn in immediately after his election. The day before the election, Adolf Berle told him that with a huge victory—say, 25 million votes—the public would be impatient for economic action immediately. Roosevelt thought the margin would be closer to 10 million (it turned out to be 12 million), but he offered a startling scenario for taking power right away if the majority was very large. As Berle recorded in his diary, FDR said:
There would be instant pressure on Hoover to fire [Secretary of State Henry L.] Stimson, appoint [Roosevelt] Secretary of State; have [Vice President Charles] Curtis resign to the President and then have the President submit his own resignation, whereupon Roosevelt would become President. He [Roosevelt] indicated that he thought there might even be some possibility of this happening, though he did not consider it probable.*
This was FDR at his most manic. If there were any possibility for such a scheme, he was the only one to raise it. Hoover was focused on doing his job until the end, which meant immersion in every policy issue. There’s no sign he ever learned of Roosevelt’s fanciful contingency, which he would have greeted with contempt.
The biggest issue of the moment was not unemployment surging past 20 percent but European debt repayment. Hoover was more of an internationalist than FDR. His inclination—attacked by Roosevelt—was to attribute the Depression to foreign causes. He argued, with some merit, that his June 1931 one-year moratorium on European debt repayment to the United States had averted economic destruction in Europe. But now the moratorium had expired and the payments—mostly to cover loans during World War I—were coming due. Two days after the election, Great Britain and France dropped what the press called a “bombshell,” telling Washington that they wanted to renegotiate their debt and miss a key December 15 payment.
They weren’t the only ones who felt no moral urgency to pay; most Europeans figured the United States had got off easy losing mostly money—not a whole generation of young men—in the war. These countries hadn’t received full war reparations from Germany, which was in economic crisis and about to elect Adolf Hitler chancellor. So why should they repay the United States? Besides, their economies could not afford it. With public opinion in the United States overwhelmingly in favor of immediate repayment, the whole mess was Topic A in Washington and other world capitals.
To address it, Hoover cut short his post-election vacation and took the unusual step of requesting a meeting with his successor. Roosevelt thought all the talk about the foreign causes of the Depression was just blame-shifting and excuse-making. He wanted to focus on recovery at home and he wasn’t going to let himself be drawn into agreements that could tie his hands for years. He was also suspicious of a trap—that Hoover was trying to embarrass him either by making him a party to his solutions, or by saying that Roosevelt had not done enough to stem the Depression. But he knew he must accept Hoover’s invitation to this rare meeting of a president and a president-elect to the White House prior to Inauguration Day.
FDR asked Moley to accompany him to the November 22 meeting, and as they made their way through the streets of Washington, Moley was surprised to see soldiers everywhere. Did Hoover fear civil unrest? Inside the White House Red Room, the Republicans chomped on cigars while the Democrats smoked cigarettes; both drank Orangeade. Roosevelt tried to break the ice by twitting outgoing Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills, who had led the attack against his fellow Harvard man during the 1932 campaign. “The only thing I objected to in the campaign was when the Republican National Committee printed a picture of your private golf course and said it was mine,” FDR said in his jocular way. Mills replied coolly that the golf course wasn’t his, but belonged to a private club where he rarely played. The two men completed their small talk through gritted teeth.
Hoover didn’t bother with banter. It was as if he and Roosevelt had never been friends during the war, had never corresponded, had never even met. The president spoke for an hour with scarcely any interruption, brilliantly explaining the complexities of international finance. He could not bring himself to look at Roosevelt. When he wasn’t staring at the Great Seal of the United States woven into the rug, he focused on Moley, whom he believed would influence the president-elect.
FDR, who knew little of the subject at hand, asked a few rudimentary questions jotted down on index cards.* Per earlier arrangement, Moley suggested that after insisting jointly on Britain’s December 15 payment, the whole thing should be handled by normal diplomatic relations. Mills and Hoover were annoyed. They wanted the revival of a debt commission (Hoover loved appointing commissions for any problem), which would have led to renegotiating the amount owed. And they were “astonished” that FDR had not consulted Democratic members of Congress. The meeting adjourned amid strained conversation.
Afterwards, Hoover was dejected. He jotted down a memo of his impressions that characterized FDR as “amiable, pleasant, anxious to be of service [but] very badly informed.” To his aides, he was even more scathing. “[The President] was shocked by his physical condition,” Ted Joslin reported to his diary that evening. “He believes he is both physically and mentally unable to discharge the duties of the office he must so soon assume. He is surely disturbed more than I have ever seen him about anything.”
The next day, FDR gave Hoover more cause for frustration. Moley, Bernard Baruch, and Charlie Michelson drafted a public statement for Roosevelt rejecting a commission and saying, in essence, that the whole debt repayment issue was up to the lame duck president and the lame duck Congress. Roosevelt later reinforced the point by telling reporters off the cuff, “It’s not my baby.”
This went over terribly in the press, where it crystallized the perception that the flip side of FDR’s charm was irresponsibility. But the hands-off posture was critical to establishing a climate of hope when Roosevelt assumed office. Discerning aides were beginning to notice that it was not lassitude but calculation that led FDR to hold back. His political instincts told him that if he were enlisted by Hoover in November, he would not be able to break sharply from the past the following March.
The standoffishness also signaled that FDR would not play the internationalist. By saying that the debts would not be renegotiated (at least not right away), he was pulling himself out of European power politics and giving the early days of his administration an isolationist hue. A more active American engagement with Europe in 1933 and 1934 might have told Hitler that he was being watched closely. As it was, Roosevelt telegraphed early and often that his primary emphasis was domestic. This vacuum was filled by accommodating European powers: much of the internationalist engagement within Europe in this period amounted to an early form of appeasement. The agreement by Great Britain and France to cut German reparations would soon embolden the Nazis to view them as paper tigers.
Whatever the long-term policy consequences, the personal relationship between Hoover and Roosevelt was now moving from bad to worse. Usually outgoing and incoming presidents battle fiercely in the campaign, then are polite during the transition. Not this time. Hoover was determined to play pin-some-
blame on the Democratic donkey; Roosevelt wanted to make sure that the people remembered that it was Republicans who had forgotten their interests. If this meant sitting by idly while the economy sunk lower, FDR could live with that.
For an engineer who was supposed to be open to practical and flexible solutions, Hoover was beginning to seem surprisingly rigid. He worried that Roosevelt was unsound on the question of sound money. So on December 17, he sent him a long telegram urging that they jointly appoint delegates to the June 1933 World Economic Conference in London, which by this time was a much-ballyhooed event that was expected to cure the global Depression and bring peace on earth in one sweet package.
FDR was now ticked off. He figured that if he and Hoover began appointing delegates to the conference jointly, the world would assume that the New Deal represented a continuation of Hoover’s policies and that he might even be locked into naming some of the delegates to his Cabinet. The whole thing would look almost like a coalition government, which was the opposite of what Roosevelt wanted to convey. He sent a cool, noncommittal response.
Rex Tugwell wrote in his diary that “the formal set up of government structure will, I imagine, never mean very much to Roosevelt. It means almost everything to Hoover.” Even then, Tugwell understood that all of the New Deal commissions, agencies, and programs to come were just means to an end and of little importance to Roosevelt on their own.
The Hoover forces now believed that FDR was trying to sabotage their efforts to stabilize the world economy. Stimson called FDR’s reply to Hoover’s proposal “laughable and lamentable” in his diary. Hoover went even further. On December 22, in a petulant act, he released their correspondence to the press, with the comment: “Governor Roosevelt considers that it is undesirable for him to accede to my suggestions for cooperative action on the foreign proposals outlined in my recent message to Congress.”
That round went to Hoover. Suddenly, Roosevelt was on the defensive, looking to the world as if he didn’t want to cooperate to ease the Depression. He quickly told the press that he had offered to consult with Hoover freely between Christmas and March 4. He used his Harvard Law School contact, Felix Frankfurter, to invite their mutual friend Stimson to Hyde Park to “settle this damn thing that nobody else seems able to do.” Stimson was eager to try to mediate between the two men, but Hoover was adamantly opposed. “My instructions to him were that he should have no communication at all with Governor Roosevelt,” the president recorded in a private memo for the files.
But FDR knew how to get around that. On January 4 of the new year, he called Hoover. By now, the White House so mistrusted FDR that all contact with him, including phone conversations, was handled with a stenographer on the line. Roosevelt surprised Hoover by telling him that he wanted to come to Washington again to discuss ways to cooperate. Hoover, who had just finished railing to aides that any further contact with the man was pointless, quickly caved to the breezy charm and agreed. After hanging up, certain that Roosevelt aides had circulated negative impressions after their November 22 meeting, Hoover told Joslin bitterly: “I suppose he [FDR] will tell the press I called him up and invited him to come here.”
With another Hoover-Roosevelt conference now scheduled for late January, the president could no longer prevent Stimson from having a preliminary meeting with FDR at Hyde Park. The Groton and Andover men got along well, spending six and a half hours alone, including the drive back down to New York City. FDR respected Stimson and seven years later would bring him into his Cabinet as secretary of war. Before this meeting, Stimson did not reciprocate the esteem, reflecting the conventional wisdom in his circle. But now the outgoing secretary of state found that despite having “strange advisers” and a “slapdash” way of doing business, the president-elect was “quick and friendly.”
The next day, FDR met secretly in New York with the French ambassador to assure him everything would work out. Deftly deploying his knowledge of history, Roosevelt suggested that the French pay some of the principal but not the interest on the loan, just as the Americans repaid the French for money lent to fight the Revolutionary War.
The Brain Trust felt FDR had been conned by Stimson. Moley described the Christmas holidays as “the most difficult period of my whole association with Roosevelt.” Both he and Tugwell believed that the boss was going squishy on what they considered the central promise of the 1932 campaign—to give priority to domestic recovery. How would debt-ridden American farmers, small businessmen, and strapped families react to the “grand gesture” of reducing the debt of Europeans? Not well, Moley reasoned. “For a time it was very doubtful whether we were to have a New Deal or a continuation of the policies that had so signally failed in the Hoover years,” Moley later wrote.
They needn’t have worried. Roosevelt was just being Roosevelt—appearing agreeable, calibrating his policy to fit the politics, finding circuitous means to achieve his broader objective. In this case, his goal was to appear cooperative with Hoover without actually being so.
The second Hoover-Roosevelt White House meeting came on January 20 (which, had George Norris’s constitutional amendment prevailed earlier, would have been Inauguration day). When FDR allowed an ambitious diplomat, Norman H. Davis, to horn in on that meeting, Moley could barely contain his rage. Instead of thinking about his turf, he would have done better to take it as a sign that Roosevelt enjoyed (and benefited from) playing aides off against each other: He knew that Davis’s presence would toss a bone to internationalists.
Hoover had decided that Roosevelt was beyond the pale. On the eve of the January 20 meeting, photographers assigned to the White House demanded that they get a chance to take pictures of the group in attendance. When Joslin told the president that he had denied the request, Hoover replied: “That’s right. I never will be photographed with him [FDR]. I have too much respect for myself.”
The meeting took place again in the Red Room and not much was accomplished except to reinforce the disdain each side felt for the other. As they wrangled over debt relief, Stimson fumed. He thought he had prior agreement for a wide-ranging approach to the international crisis and that Roosevelt had become “rather wobbly again.” Like Moley, Stimson still didn’t fully appreciate the casual craftiness of the president-elect. Hoover stayed tactful and aloof, according to Stimson, because of rumors “about Roosevelt’s personal dislike for him.” Stimson was contemptuous of Roosevelt’s failure to comprehend the subtleties of how to get the upper hand with the British on debt repayment. He felt that Hoover’s mastery of the complexities made FDR look like “a peanut.” Such views had become commonplace among the financial elite of the country. Tommy Corcoran, a young Harvard-educated lawyer working for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, was “angry and dismayed” that FDR would not join with Hoover to stabilize the economy. “Roosevelt seemed a villainous fool to me.”
Hoover, for his part, was getting a bit cocky for a man who had just lost his job in a landslide. He figured that perhaps Congress could force Roosevelt to bend, so he convinced his main ally in the Senate, Republican David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, to rip into the president-elect on the Senate floor. “I’ll have my way with Roosevelt yet,” Hoover told Joslin.
*He also showed no sense of humor about what he considered Roosevelt’s “ungracious” remarks about him at the 1929 Gridiron Dinner, when FDR used the social occasion to criticize Hoover’s record in a light vein.
*In this far-fetched scenario, FDR forgot to mention that Garner, as House Speaker and second in line to the presidency, would have to resign, too, as well as the third in line, George H. Moses, president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate.
*On subjects where he was better informed, FDR did not use index cards, though Ronald Reagan famously did.