SLOWLY GAINING SPEED, THE glistening Ford Trimotor bumped across the grassy Albany airfield and nosed up into lowering clouds. It was July 2, 1932. The day before, the Democrats, meeting in Chicago, had nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt for President of the United States. Roosevelt and his family had received the news in their Hyde Park mansion after long hours in front of the radio listening to the bombastic speeches charged with hatred for Hoover Republicans and all their works. At the moment of greatest suspense the Roosevelt forces had gone over the top.
As the plane turned west Roosevelt had a chance to glimpse the Hudson, the river of American politics. With his twinkling pince-nez, his cockily uptilted cigarette holder, his double-breasted suit stretched across his big torso, his cheery, mobile features, he radiated exuberant self-confidence and a beguiling self-esteem as he leafed through a pile of congratulatory telegrams. He had long planned this little stroke of innovative leadership— to accept the nomination in person instead of awaiting a pompous notification weeks later. He was the first presidential candidate to fly; perhaps it was a tonic to this vigorous man, crippled since 1921 by polio, to demonstrate his mobility at the climactic hour. In any event, he could have fun with the press.
“I may go out by submarine to escape being followed by you men,” he had twitted the reporters. Or he might ride out on a bicycle built for five. “Papa could sit in front and steer and my four sons could sit behind.”
Part of his family was flying with him—his wife, Eleanor, and sons Elliott and John—along with counselor Samuel Rosenman, secretaries “Missy” LeHand and Grace Tully, and two state troopers as bodyguards. The rest of the family and Louis Howe, his longtime political confidant and aide, awaited the plane in Chicago. Eleanor Roosevelt, pressed by reporters, was staying in the background. “One person in politics is sufficient for one family,” she had said the night before, while instructing the butler to bring frankfurters for the gathering. “I’ll do as I’ve always done, accompany my husband on his trips and help in any way I can.”
The plane pounded on, following the route of the old Erie Canal—the thin artery that had pumped people and goods into Buffalo and points west, and farm produce back to the East. Now an economic blight lay across the land. For a time Roosevelt watched the deceptively lush fields unfold below; then he turned to Rosenman. They had work to do—trimming and polishing the acceptance speech. Over the radio came reports of the restive delegates in Chicago. Some were starting home. The disgruntled men of Tammany, sore over Al Smith’s defeat, were planning to be gone before Roosevelt arrived. Convention managers were trying to enliven the delegates with songs and celebrities. On the plane Roosevelt and Rosenman huddled over the speech. It had to galvanize the weary delegates, the whole weary nation.
As buffeting winds pushed the plane far behind schedule, the two men lopped more and more paragraphs off the draft. Roosevelt had no time for the crowds that gathered at the refueling stops in Buffalo and Cleveland. While John was quietly sick in the rear of the plane, his father passed pages of his draft to Elliott and Eleanor, chain-smoked, joked with his family, and slept. When the plane touched down hours later in Chicago, Roosevelt boasted, “I was a good sailor,” as he greeted his oldest child, Anna, and sons James and Franklin.
The airport scene was chaotic. Crowds pressed in around the candidate, knocking off his hat and leaving his glasses askew. Campaign manager James Farley pushed through to Roosevelt. “Jim, old pal—put it right there—great work!” Louis Howe was his usual dour self. Climbing into the candidate’s car with him, Howe dismissed the Roosevelt and Rosenman draft, which had been telephoned to him the night before. Rosenman, forewarned of Howe’s attitude, made his way through the throng to the candidate’s car, only to hear Howe saying, as he thrust his own draft into Roosevelt’s hand, “I tell you it’s all right, Franklin. It’s much better than the speech you’ve got now—and you can read it while you’re driving down to the convention hall, and get familiar with it.”
“But, Louis,” Rosenman heard his boss say, “you know I can’t deliver a speech that I’ve never done any work on myself, and that I’ve never even read.…” When Howe persisted, Roosevelt agreed to look it over. As his car moved through big crowds to the stadium, he lifted his hat and shouted “hellos” left and right, pausing to glance at Howe’s prose. Finding Howe’s opening paragraphs not radically different from his own draft, he put them on top of it.
Waiting at the Chicago Stadium, amid ankle-deep litter and half-eaten hot dogs, amid posters of FDR and discarded placards of his bested foes, amid the smoke and stink of a people’s conclave, were the delegates in all their variety and contrariety—Louisiana populists and Brooklyn pols, California radicals and Mississippi racists, Pittsburgh laborites and Philadelphia lawyers, Boston businessmen and Texas oilmen. The crowd stirred, then erupted in pandemonium, as Roosevelt, resplendent in a blue suit with a red rose, made his way stiffly across the platform on a son’s arm, steadied himself at the podium. He looked up at the roaring crowd.
He plunged at once into his theme—leadership, the bankrupt conservative leadership of the Republican party, the ascendant liberal leadership of the “Democracy.” After a tribute to the “great indomitable, unquenchable, progressive soul of our Commander-in-Chief, Woodrow Wilson,” he declared that he accepted the 1932 party platform “100 per cent.”
“As we enter this new battle, let us keep always present with us some of the ideals of the Party: The fact that the Democratic Party by tradition and by the continuing logic of history, past and present, is the bearer of liberalism and of progress, and at the same time of safety to our institutions.” The failure of the Republican leadership—he would not attack the Republican party but only the leadership, “day in and day out,” he promised— might bring about “unreasoning radicalism.”
Roosevelt was speaking in his full, resonant voice. “To meet by reaction that danger of radicalism is to invite disaster. Reaction is no barrier to the radical. It is a challenge, a provocation. The way to meet that danger is to offer a workable program of reconstruction, and the party to offer it is the party with clean hands.
“This, and this only, is a proper protection against blind reaction on the one hand and an improvised, hit-or-miss, irresponsible opportunism on the other.”
The candidate then challenged members of both parties: “Here and now I invite those nominal Republicans who find that their conscience cannot be squared with the groping and the failure of their party leaders to join hands with us; here and now, in equal measure, I warn those nominal Democrats who squint at the future with their faces turned toward the past, and who feel no responsibility to the demands of the new time, that they are out of step with their Party.” The people wanted a genuine choice, not a choice between two reactionary doctrines. “Ours must be a party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens.”
Roosevelt then made a series of positive—and prophetic—promises to the Democracy’s constituencies: protection for the consumer, self-financing public works for the jobless, safeguarding land and timberland for the farmer, repeal of the Prohibition amendment for the thirsty, jobs for labor, a pared-down government for businessmen. But Roosevelt repeatedly sounded a higher note, especially as he concluded.
“On the farms, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in the villages, millions of our citizens cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever. Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain.
“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage.
“This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”
“He had come in an airplane, symbol of the new age, touching the imagination of the people,” wrote a reporter. But his roots lay in a horse-and-buggy era that had transmuted relentlessly into the railroad epoch, and then into the age of the automobile. Both in his heritage and in his growth he could say with Walt Whitman that he embraced multitudes.
He was born January 30, 1882, in a mansion high on a bluff overlooking the Hudson. Breast-fed for a year by his mother, Sara, he grew up in a home of enveloping security and tranquility. An only child, he lived among doting parents and nurses, affectionate governesses and tutors, in a house that was warm and spacious though by no means palatial. Outside lay the grounds peopled by gardeners, coachmen, stable boys, farmhands. North and south along the river towered the mansions of the truly wealthy. It was the world of Currier & Ives come to life—sleighing on country rides past farmhouses wreathed in snow, stopping with his father in barnyards filled with horses and dogs, swimming and fishing in the majestic river, digging out of snowstorms—most memorably the great blizzard of 1888.
Occasionally the long mournful whistle of a train passing below carried into the home, but it brought no hint of the hates and fears simmering in the nation’s urban and industrial world in the 1880s—no hint of the wants and needs of immigrants pouring by the hundreds of thousands into the city a hundred miles to the south, of the desperate strikes that swept the nation’s railroads, of the bone-deep misery of countless southern and western farmers and their wives, of the massacre of workers in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The Roosevelts traveled by rail but never left their protected environment of family carriages, private railroad cars, of ships where there were always, as Sara said, “people one knows.” Places they visited teemed with cousins and aunts and friends of their own social class. Nor did young Franklin leave this social cocoon when he departed for Groton, one of the most exclusive schools in the nation, and later for Harvard’s “Gold Coast.”
It was hardly a life to ignite political ambition or a passionate lust for power, if these result from early material or psychological blows to self-esteem, as Harold D. Lasswell and others have contended. It was easy to understand how Roosevelt’s future friends and rivals strove to overcome a sense of insecurity and inferiority in childhood: Winston Churchill, virtually ignored by his socially ambitious mother and by a father slowly going insane from syphilis, cabined and bullied in the cruel and rigid world of Victorian boarding schools; Benito Mussolini, son of a half-socialist, half-anarchist father, a mean-spirited and fiery-tempered youth, expelled from school at the age of ten for stabbing and wounding another boy; Adolf Hitler, orphaned in his teens and cast out into vagrancy; Josef Dzhugashvili, later Stalin, living in the leaky adobe hut of a peasant cobbler in Georgia, a land seared by ancient hatreds.
Yet more subtle and significant psychological forces were molding young Franklin’s personality. The Roosevelt and Delano families had been established long enough on the banks of the Hudson to despise the vulgar parvenus who were pushing to power and riches in the boom times of the nineteenth century. But the Roosevelts themselves were parvenus compared with the Schuylers and Van Rensselaers who had been living along the river for a century or more. Sara Roosevelt’s father had made his fortune by selling Turkish and Indian opium to Chinese addicts. The comfortably well-off Roosevelts could not ignore the far wealthier families around them; for the rest of his life FDR would show an almost obsessive interest in the homes and trappings of the ostentatious “nouveaux riches,” such as the Vanderbilts’ baronial mansion a few miles to the north.
Nor could young Franklin escape direct confrontations with the social elite. At Groton he was barred from the inner social and athletic circles; at Harvard he was not tapped by Porcellian, the most exclusive club. He was seared by these rejections far more than he admitted in his breezy, dutiful letters to his parents. Many, including Eleanor Roosevelt, later wondered whether Franklin’s rejection by young patricians, most of whom would go into brokerages and banking, led him to “desert his class” and to identify with life’s outcasts. Being a Porcellian rejectee hardly catapulted Franklin into the proletariat; yet these class and psychic privations had a part in shaping his later views.
Far more important were the times he lived in—the heyday of turn-of-the-century progressivism, a muckraking press, and Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal. And always there was the role model, in the other major branch of the Roosevelt family, of “Uncle Ted” himself—the New York City police commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, seemingly single-handed conqueror of San Juan Hill, and, during Franklin’s Harvard years, President of the United States. Even more, there was the President’s niece Eleanor Roosevelt.
Much has been made of Eleanor Roosevelt’s bleak childhood—of her unloving mother who died when she was eight; of her handsome, dashing, adored father who showered endearments on her but deserted her again and again and then for good, dying of drink when she was ten; of her life as an orphan, neglected by her grandmother, tyrannized by her governess, and frightened by her alcoholic uncles. By her early teens she was a timid, sensitive, awkward child, with a wistful shadowed face and a tall figure usually attired in a shapeless, overly short dress. But this was not the Eleanor Roosevelt whom Franklin courted and married. By her late teens she had become far more at ease and poised in her family relationships, and with her warm and sympathetic manner, her expressive face and soft yet alert eyes, and above all her lively intelligence and quick compassion she had won a host of friends of both sexes. Her metamorphosis was largely the product of caring teachers—especially of the extraordinary Marie Souvestre, headmistress of the school Eleanor attended in England, a sophisticated, sharing, and demanding daughter of the French Enlightenment who drew Eleanor to good literature, foreign cultures and languages, and social radicalism.
The two young Roosevelts who ardently plighted their troth in March 1905 felt very much in rapport, but there were deep potential divisions between them—and within each of them. In her early years Eleanor had developed a compassion for fellow sufferers—for all sufferers—that she was never to lose. She was haunted for months by the tormented face of a ragged man who had tried to snatch a purse from a woman sitting near her. Roosevelt in those years was still moved far more by a patrician concern for people, in the abstract, by noblesse oblige—or by what his mother preferred to call “honneur oblige.” Eleanor showed her concern day after day by teaching children at her settlement house. When Franklin once accompanied her to a tenement where one of her charges lay ill, he came out exclaiming, “My God, I didn’t know people lived like that!”
Franklin’s ambition seemed to soar with the taste of office rather than in advance of it. Unexpectedly a run for the state senate opened up for him; once nominated, he plunged into the struggle with enormous dash and energy, and won. He entered the state senate as a vaguely progressive anti-Tammanyite; in office he led a fight against Tammany and moved so far to the left as to become virtually a “farm-labor” legislator. A Wilsonian in 1912, he gained the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy without much effort—but once in the job he became the most vigorous and committed navy man since Teddy Roosevelt himself had held the job. Action—and skill in action—spurred further ambition.
While Eleanor had her own values, commitments, and purposes, she was so self-effacing as to seem to lack ambition. Life closed in around her after her marriage. She had not only a mother-in-law who refused to let her son go but a husband who saw a clear demarcation between his public career and her family role. “I listened to all his plans with a great deal of interest,” she said later. “It never occurred to me that I had any part to play.” Having six babies in ten years—one died at seven months—narrowed and deepened her personal life. Her public role became a pale reflection of her husband’s—entertaining legislators in Albany, doing the rounds of government wives in Washington, helping with Red Cross and other war activities. Her husband was not always supportive. When to Washington’s amusement she blundered into telling The New York Times that in her wartime food-saving effort she had found that “making ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible, but highly profitable,” he wrote her cuttingly, “All I can say is that your latest newspaper campaign is a corker and I am proud to be the husband of the Originator, Discoverer and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires!”
Most devastating of all to Eleanor’s self-esteem was her husband’s wartime romance with Lucy Mercer. “Franklin’s love of another woman brought her to almost total despair,” according to Joseph P. Lash, but “she emerged from the ordeal a different woman.” She said years later, “I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time. I really grew up that year.” She insisted that he break off with Lucy—or with her. A chastened husband, aware that a divorce would be politically devastating, and probably also under motherly pressure, chose the former. He knew too that his wife could be a great political asset, especially since women at last had won the right to vote in national elections.
Invited to join his campaign train when he ran for Vice President in 1920, Eleanor Roosevelt got her fill of the most grueling kind of electioneering. The Democratic debacle sent Roosevelt back to private life and gave his wife some hope of liberation from politics. This was not to be. Struck down by polio, Roosevelt endured intense physical and psychological pain with outward stoicism—he was rarely heard to complain—while Eleanor sought to keep the family on an even keel, served as her husband’s political stand-in, and tried desperately to maintain her own composure as the mother of five children ranging from five to fifteen years old.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt emerged from their ordeal tempered and matured, but not fundamentally changed in their political attitudes. Having twice been defeated—in 1920 and earlier, in 1914, when he had made a try for the U.S. Senate—Roosevelt would proceed slowly, regaining his political base as he sought to regain his ability to walk. He would continue to pursue political office—making necessary compromises to achieve it but proceeding boldly on policy once in power. Eleanor would continue to pursue political goals—peace, help to the poor, women’s rights, clean government—by working in the organizations necessary to achieve them. She became increasingly active in the Women’s Trade Union League, founded in 1903 by Jane Addams, in peace efforts, and in the tedious job of trying to rebuild the New York State Democratic party. Everyday politics still did not excite her; Franklin was the politician, she said later, and she the agitator. So she acted within the boundaries set by her husband, who saw competitive politics as essentially men’s business even while he sought laws that would aid women.
These two legacies divided the couple, now both in their forties, as they moved back into public life during the twenties—as Roosevelt accepted his party’s draft for governor in 1928, as he campaigned vigorously and won a narrow victory while Eleanor intensified her party and campaign work, as he sought to carry out his liberal promises often against recalcitrant Republican legislators, as he won a landslide reelection for governor in 1930. The closer he came to the presidential nomination fight, the more he seemed to compromise, from Eleanor’s standpoint—on the League of Nations, on Prohibition, on Tammany, on states’ rights. But Roosevelt had a far better sense of the electoral complexities. On the League issue in particular he was the target of front-page fulminations by publisher William Randolph Hearst, who, Roosevelt knew, could influence delegates to the 1932 Democratic convention as well as newspaper readers. He caved in to Hearst. Eleanor conspired with her husband’s staff members and friends to stiffen his resolve. When an angry Wilsonian came in to berate him for a “shabby” statement on the League, he expressed regret and then asked his visitor if she would help make peace between Eleanor and him. “She hasn’t spoken to me for three days!”
One hard political fact confronted Roosevelt—the disheveled, fragmented state of the Democratic party, whose convention a candidate could carry only by winning two-thirds of the delegate vote. The party wielded little political muscle as a national organization; during the mid-twenties the Democrats had not even had a national headquarters but rather lived off the largesse of millionaires like John J. Raskob and Bernard Baruch. Nationally the party was composed of ideological and regional shards, each of which seemed to be represented in the candidates who entered the nomination fight after Roosevelt took the lead—Al Smith for the urban Democracy; House Speaker John Garner for the Southwest; demagogic Governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray of Oklahoma for the rural West; Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland for the old Jeffersonian, states’ rights Democrats; Newton D. Baker for the Wilson internationalists; and a string of favorite sons.
Such a panoply of rivals both fortified and weakened Roosevelt—they fragmented his opposition but also threatened to slice off chunks of his own nationwide support. But he had many assets, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., summarized them: “a familiar name, a charming personality, demonstrated political popularity, an impressive executive record in Albany, a dramatic personal victory over illness, a wide and well-cultivated acquaintance across the country.” With the devoted and expert help of Eleanor Roosevelt, Louis Howe, Jim Farley, Sam Rosenman, and a host of others, Roosevelt’s bandwagon carried him to victory through a string of primaries, aside from a win by the ever-popular Smith in Massachusetts and by Garner in California. The Roosevelt forces arrived at the Chicago convention with a handsome majority of the delegates but tantalizingly short—by about 200 votes—of the necessary two-thirds.
Feverishly the governor’s foes tried to head him off, clasping hands across ancient fissures in the party. The Roosevelt campaign effort almost blew up in Chicago when a group of FDR enthusiasts launched an attack against the two-thirds rule, thus giving the opposition a moral issue about “changing the rules of the game” and jeopardizing the support of Southerners who had long used the rule to protect racial and regional power. Roosevelt, who had originally planned to challenge the rule but had now lost control of the timing, retreated as gracefully as possible.
So he would have to attain the magic two-thirds, and he did, through the disarray of his opponents, the unflagging efforts of Farley and other FDR men on the convention floor and in the smoke-filled rooms, and—at a critical moment after the third ballot—the consummation of the candidate’s patient courting of Texas’s Garner and California senator William G. McAdoo and his genuflection before Hearst. Fearing that Baker might win if Roosevelt did not, the Californians and the Texans pooled their poker hands. The big card was the vice-presidential nomination for Garner. Once he agreed—reluctantly, because he had no great wish to quit the Speakership—the deal was made. To McAdoo was given the exquisite satisfaction of settling the convention score of 1924, when he had been denied the nomination by Al Smith.
“California came here to nominate a President of the United States,” he shouted in the teeth of the howling and booing delegates. “She did not come to deadlock the Convention or to engage in another devastating contest like that of 1924.” More hisses and groans. “California casts 44 votes for Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Then bedlam.
“Good old McAdoo,” Roosevelt exclaimed by his radio at Hyde Park. While Eleanor went to the kitchen to cook bacon and eggs, he began planning for the next morning’s rendezvous with the waiting plane.
Out of the pandemonium in the Chicago Stadium a young novelist, John Dos Passos, walked down West Madison Street. Gradually the din of speeches faded from his ears. No one in the seedy crowd about him seemed to know of the “historic” event that had just taken place. He stepped down a flight of stairs into the darkness of the roadway under Michigan Avenue.
“This world too has its leisure class,” he noted. “They lie in rows along the ledges above the roadway, huddled in grimed newspapers, gray sag-faced men in worn-out clothes, discards … men who have lost the power to want. Try to tell one of them that the gre-eat Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor of the gre-eat state of New York, has been nominated by the gre-eat Democratic party as its candidate for President, and you’ll get what the galleries at the convention gave Mr. McAdoo when they discovered that he had the votes of Texas and California in his pocket and was about to shovel them into the Roosevelt bandwagon, a prolonged and enthusiastic Boooo. Hoover or Roosevelt, it’ll be the same cops.”
The Democrats had their man. But who was he? Perhaps those who had sized him up best were the convention delegates and their leaders. Roosevelt was attractive, ambitious, electable, a reliable deal-maker; he was “available.” But the press and the pundits were looking for a higher quality—leadership. In this they had found Roosevelt lacking. The New Republic had viewed him as utterly without the kind of “great intellectual force or supreme moral stamina” that underlay strong leadership. He hedged on everything, complained the Washington Post. Wishy-washy, said Henry Mencken. “Too easy to please”—not the dangerous enemy of anything, Walter Lippmann had said earlier in the year. “In boldness of political leadership,” he was “certainly no Cleveland or Wilson,” said The Outlook.
This criticism galled Roosevelt, but he could only respond privately. “Can’t you see,” he wrote to a Wilsonian outraged over his desertion of the League, “that loyalty to the ideals of Woodrow Wilson is just as strong in my heart as it is in yours—but have you ever stopped to consider that there is a difference between ideals and the methods of attaining them? Ideals do not change, but methods do change with every generation and world circumstance.
“Here is the difference between me and some of my fainthearted friends: I am looking for the best modern vehicle to reach the goal of an ideal while they insist on a vehicle which was brand new and in good running order twelve years ago. Think this over! And for heaven’s sake have a little faith.” But his friends felt that he was being fainthearted. They knew, moreover, that on some issues he was consistent and committed—on big questions, such as the need for an activist government and a liberal Democratic party, and on specific issues, such as the vital role of electric power in his state and nation. He was not even consistent in his inconsistency.
Those who examined Roosevelt’s inner circle for a clue to his fundamental and enduring beliefs were no less puzzled. By campaign time Roosevelt had collected around himself a group of “brain trusters” as diverse as they were talented. There were Columbia University political scientist Raymond Moley, a onetime city reformer who had since become most concerned about the “anarchy of concentrated economic power”; Adolf Berle, a child prodigy at Harvard who had continued to be so prodigious in law and economics that H. G. Wells once said of him that his worldview “seemed to contain all I had ever learnt and thought, but better arranged and closer to reality”; Rexford Tugwell, a Columbia economist who was both a romantic and a planner, an intellectual experimenter and a governmental centralizer. These men, united in their concern over the chaos, inefficiency, and cruelty of capitalist breakdown, were divided over monetary and other economic issues.
Also close to Roosevelt was another penetrating mind but of quite different cast—Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School, an irrepressible pursuer of legal justice and good conversation, who abhorred Utopian ideas for social reconstruction and called for economic decentralization and fair play through regulation of banking and securities. He was carrying the flag of his mentor, Justice Louis D. Brandeis, which was also the flag of many progressive—and powerful—Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Of quite different orientation were a number of self-styled “Jeffersonians” who preached states’ rights, limited government, and above all economy and budget-balancing, and who with the help of Louis Howe could gain access to Roosevelt at critical moments. Others operated on the fringe: Cordell Hull, a courtly Tennessean and veteran politico whose suspicion of big business took the form mainly of a near-obsession against high tariffs; General Hugh Johnson, a colorful old army man even at the age of fifty, a Bernard Baruch protégé who believed both in budget-balancing and in central governmental direction of the economy; various monetary theorists; and Eleanor Roosevelt.
The candidate made no effort to impose intellectual unity on the core group—he had none to impose. But he did establish a clear line between “politics” and “policies.” Farley, after being installed by Roosevelt in place of Raskob as Democratic national chairman, said to Moley, “I’m interested in getting him the votes—nothing else. Issues aren’t my business. They’re yours and his. You keep out of mine, and I’ll keep out of yours.” Roosevelt reposed such confidence in these diverse brains—they never made up a monolithic “trust”—that he left speech- and issue-planning under Moley’s direction while he took off with three of his sons in a forty-foot yawl for a sail along the New England coast.
Roosevelt had several acute questions of campaign strategy to ponder as he sailed contentedly under sunny July skies, occasionally stopping at sleepy ports for political confabs. One was how to appeal to progressive Republicans. The inheritors of the cause of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follette were still active in the GOP—and still frustrated. Rejecting Hoover, they had other alternatives besides Roosevelt: form a new progressive party, support Norman Thomas’s Socialist party, or sit the election out. Some progressives, especially in the East, doubted Roosevelt’s character and convictions. Why support a tweedledum Democrat? One progressive of impeccable credentials—George W. Norris of Nebraska— announced for Roosevelt early and staunchly, however, largely because of Roosevelt’s consistent support of public electric power. Some progressives followed. A national progressive league for Roosevelt and Garner was formed under Norris. Hiram Johnson endorsed the Democratic candidate, as did Robert La Follette,Jr., despite his doubts about Roosevelt’s commitment to social justice. Other progressives held back.
An easier question was whether Roosevelt should actively campaign at all. Some urged that he conduct a front-porch campaign, as presidential candidates had done in olden times. They felt that a campaign tour was unnecessary, that he might not be up to it physically. Garner, visiting Roosevelt at Hyde Park, advised that all the boss had to do was to stay alive until election day. Farley, passing on the mixed views of party leaders, favored an active campaign. Roosevelt took little urging. His Dutch was up, he told Farley. Soon he, Farley, and Howe were planning an election drive that became even more ambitious once the candidate got underway.
The toughest question of campaign strategy was whether the candidate should offer a coherent, challenging set of ideas or tailor his views to expedient campaign needs. Not only did Tugwell and other advisers want their boss to speak out; they wanted him to present a program, comprehensive, consistent, with focus and priorities. He was “weak on relations, on the conjunctural, the joining together of forces and processes, especially in the national economy,” as Tugwell saw it. Roosevelt’s scattered approach to policy gave force to acid comments by left-wing commentators, Tugwell felt; he himself had boiled over in Chicago when he picked up a newspaper with a column by Heywood Broun calling Roosevelt “the corkscrew candidate of a convoluting convention.”
Roosevelt continued to be disappointed and even hurt by the liberal intellectual critics. The intellectuals never allowed a politician the least leeway, he said to Tugwell; they were positively fearful of being caught in an approving mood. But what he was trying to do, Roosevelt continued, was to get elected, not simply arouse agitation and argument. Let Hoover be the ideologue—and be cramped by this. The Democrats, by staying more “flexible,” could become the majority party. Leadership with such support might continue to win elections, perhaps for a generation.
By following a wobbly line somewhere between the middle and somewhat left of middle Roosevelt made himself a difficult target for Hoover, but he also invited attacks from both right and left. The financier and industrialist Owen D. Young, after visiting Roosevelt at Hyde Park in midsummer, had the feeling that the governor “was avoiding real issues” with him and perhaps had met with him only for campaign cosmetics. A few days later Roosevelt reaped a whirlwind on the left. Sitting at lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt, Tugwell, and others, he took a call from Huey Long, whose angry voice carried to the others at the table. As Tugwell remembered the conversation, Long was furious because Roosevelt had seen that “stuffed shirt Owen Young” while the Kingfish sat down in Louisiana and never heard from anybody.
“God damn it, Frank, who d’you think got you nominated?”
“Well,” said Roosevelt, “you had a lot to do with it.”
“You sure as hell are forgettin’ about it as fast as you can.” Long complained that there was a “regular parade” of people like Young seeing the governor.
“Oh, I see a lot of people you don’t read about. The newspaper boys only write up the ones their editors like.”
If Roosevelt didn’t stop listening to people like that, Long said, Roosevelt wouldn’t carry the South. “You got to turn me loose.”
“What d’you mean, turn you loose?” Roosevelt said. “You are loose.”
“That Farley,” said Long, “that’s what I mean, and that Louis.” They wouldn’t give him any money. He wanted to work with Roosevelt directly. Was the governor coming South?
“No, I don’t need to; your country there is safe enough.”
“Don’t fool yourself—it ain’t safe at all. You’ve got to give these folks what they want. They want fat-back and greens.…” Long went on and on, shouting expletives and demands. When he finally hung up, Roosevelt sat ruminating for a few moments about how Long was leading people to the promised land. “You know,” he said, “that’s the second most dangerous man in America.” Pressed as to who was the most dangerous man, he said, “Douglas MacArthur.”
Ready to move left or right, or hover in the center, Roosevelt began his speaking campaign in Columbus, Ohio, late in August with a denunciation of Hoover’s “Alice-in-Wonderland” economics, then presented his own proposals for federal regulation of security exchanges, banks, and holding companies. In Sea Girt, New Jersey, before a monster throng mobilized by Boss Frank Hague of Jersey City, he called for repeal of Prohibition, as had the Democratic platform, but coupled this with a sermon in favor of temperance. In mid-September, in Topeka, he came out for the “planned use of the land,” lower taxes for farmers, federal credit for refinancing farm mortgages, and the barest shadow of a voluntary domestic allotment plan to manage farm surpluses, at the same time pulling back from the old McNary-Haugen formula that he had indiscreetly endorsed in a book. In Salt Lake City he took a quite different tack with a call for an integrated federal transportation effort, including federal regulation and aid for the floundering railroad industry.
Sharp disputes broke out among Roosevelt’s advisers over these speeches, with the result often a compromise. Thus the Topeka speech, shaped by perhaps twenty-five minds, produced what Roosevelt wanted: “a speech so broad in implications,” according to Frank Freidel, “that it would encompass all the aspirations of Western farmers no matter what their prejudices, and at the same time so vague in its endorsement of domestic allotment that it would not frighten conservative Easterners.”
In the midst of this weaving and fencing Roosevelt gave a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco that electrified progressives. It was powerful in its parts: an invitation to “consider with me in the large, some of the relationships of Government and economic life that go deeply into our daily lives, our happiness, our future and our security”; a long review of the rise of the centralized state and the struggle of the individual to assert his rights; of the rise of the machine age and of the “financial Titans” who had “pushed the railroads to the Pacific” ruthlessly and wastefully but had built the railroads; of the decline of equality of opportunity under capitalism; of the need for an “economic declaration of rights” to meet deeply human needs. The speech was studded with acute insights, memorable phrases, and evocative ideas, well suited to his California audience and especially to the venerable progressive Hiram Johnson.
But this notable address did not hang together. It began with the proposition that “America is new” and had “the great potentialities of youth” but pages later concluded that “our industrial plant is built” and probably overbuilt, “our last frontier has long since been reached,” that the safety valve of the western frontier was gone, that “we are not able to invite the immigration from Europe to share our endless plenty.” Hence the task was not expansion but the “soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand,” of “adjusting production to consumption,” of “distributing wealth and products more equitably.” The speech had been written by Berle and was delivered by the candidate with minimal change; Tugwell claimed Roosevelt never even saw it until he opened it on the lectern, and Moley disagreed with key parts of it.
The candidate’s final string of speeches continued in this vein, rich in good ideas and specific proposals but often unconnected and even inconsistent. When he was presented with a speech draft endorsed by Hull calling for a general lowering of tariffs, and with another that called for gradual, bilateral “old-fashioned Yankee horse-trades,” he left Moley speechless by instructing him to “weave the two together.” Following a series of addresses calling for social justice, for action on unemployment and social welfare, he accused Hoover late in the campaign of reckless and extravagant spending, of burdening the people with taxes, of inflating the bureaucracy, of drastically unbalancing the budget. Herbert Hoover a spendthrift! Roosevelt made a flat promise to “reduce the cost of current Federal Government operations by 25 percent.” By now critics were charging once again that no profound difference in policy separated the Democratic candidate from the Republican President.
Herbert Hoover saw profound differences. At first he had not taken his opponent’s candidacy too seriously, telling his Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, that Roosevelt would be the easiest man to beat. But as the summer progressed and Roosevelt danced all around him on issues, Hoover’s composure gave way; visitors found him shifting between dark pessimism and blazing anger at foes and deserters. In mid-September he told Stimson that while “he was gaining in the East he would lose everything west of the Alleghenies and would lose the election.” Anger, indignation, pride, passion brought him out on the hustings in the fall. Painstakingly writing his own speeches, delivering them in a flat, hard monotone—Mencken said he could recite the Twenty-third Psalm and make it sound like a search warrant—Hoover tried to get a fix on this “chameleon on the Scotch plaid.” As he drove down city streets he encountered boos and catcalls, signs reading “In Hoover we trusted; now we are busted”; the cold hostility of rows of onlookers.
There might have been a tragically ennobling aspect to the campaign, as the ideologue of the besieged order grimly defended his castle against the would-be usurper. But the campaign flattened out, despite frantic warnings by Hoover against fascist and socialist tendencies in the other camp, and demagogic attacks by Roosevelt on the “present Republican leadership” as the “Horsemen of Destruction, Delay, Deceit, Despair.” If Hoover could not get a grip on Roosevelt, neither could Socialist Norman Thomas or the candidates of other minor parties. It was not 1896 or 1904 or 1912. In the gravest economic crisis they had ever known, the American people seemed bewildered and benumbed, lethargic amid the tempests of the politicians.
Polls—and especially the results of Maine’s early state election—robbed the outcome of much suspense. Assembled on election night in Democratic party headquarters on the first floor of the Biltmore, Roosevelt’s family and friends received favorable early returns and then reports of a near-sweep. Only Pennsylvania and five smaller states stayed with the President. Roosevelt won 22.8 million votes, Hoover 15.8 million, Norman Thomas 885,000, Communist William Z. Foster 103,000.
Louis Howe uncorked a bottle of sherry he had put away twenty years before in Albany. After receiving a gracious concession telegram from Hoover, the President-elect left for his Sixty-fifth Street house, to be met by his mother, who said, “I never thought particularly about my son being President, but if he’s going to be President, I hope he’ll be a good one!” Eleanor Roosevelt seemed in a less celebratory mood. She was happy for her husband, she told people, while to a close woman friend she confided that she had not wished to be First Lady. “If I wanted to be selfish, I could wish Franklin had not been elected.” She had watched Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and learned what it meant to be the wife of a President, and she did not like the prospect. It meant the end of her personal life.
She would have to work out her own salvation. She could not know yet that this might have to wait out the salvation of a nation.
Four long months stretched ahead before the President-elect could take office, for the Constitution of 1787 had been drafted in a world of travel by carriage, sail, and horseback, not train, auto, and plane. During those four months lame-duck members of Congress would meet, debate and denounce, answer to no one, and go home.
Could human misery wail for constitutional processes? During the autumn the economy had fallen off even further—a result, Hoover convinced himself, of business fears of what the Democrats would do. As winter approached, business activity dropped to between a quarter and a third of “normalcy” and one worker out of five—perhaps one out of four—was jobless. The employed were hardly better off. Women lining slippers—one every forty-five seconds—in Manhattan sweatshops earned barely over one dollar for a nine-hour day. Girls sewing aprons for 2½ cents per apron could make 20 cents a day. “There is not a garbage-dump in Chicago which is not diligently haunted by the hungry,” Edmund Wilson reported.
“Last summer in the hot weather when the smell was sickening and the flies were thick, there were a hundred people a day coming to one of the dumps, falling on the heap of refuse as soon as the truck had pulled out and digging in it with sticks and hands. They would devour all the pulp that was left on the old slices of watermelon and canteloupe till the rinds were as thin as paper; and they would take away and wash and cook discarded onions, turnips, potatoes, cabbage or carrots. Meat is a more difficult matter, but they salvage a good deal of that too. The best is the butcher’s meat which has been frozen and hasn’t spoiled. In the case of the other meat, there are usually bad parts that have to be cut out or they scald it and sprinkle it with soda to kill the rotten taste and the smell.”
Poverty and despair lay deep over the farmlands as well. Farmers were burning corn in their stoves in places where coal cost four dollars a ton and corn sold for a third of that. Desperate men were brandishing hangman’s nooses and shotguns to keep deputy sheriffs from foreclosing their mortgages and selling their acreage. Farmers bid in a neighbor’s foreclosed farm for a dime, amid threats to serious bidders, and then turned the land back to the neighbor. But local action, they knew, was not enough. Farm leaders in Nebraska talked about marching tens of thousands of protesters to the state capitol and tearing it down if they were denied relief. Farm leaders in Washington warned of revolution in the countryside.
Who would take leadership during the interregnum? Not Congress. Weighted down by 158 members who had been given their walking papers in November, divided in party control, surly toward the President, unsure of the President-elect, the legislators fribbled and dawdled, squabbling over beer, deadlocking over relief, putting off action on farm mortgages and bank deposit legislation.
Not big business. Questioned by the Senate Finance Committee, noted businessmen admitted virtual intellectual bankruptcy. He had no solution, said one New York banker, “and I do not believe anybody else has.” Myron C. Taylor of U.S. Steel and others saw only one possibility— retrenchment. Pleas to balance the budget sounded like a mindless litany in the hearing room. The business leadership of the nation had fallen from its highest level of influence, judged Walter Lippmann, to its lowest.
Nor would Roosevelt take leadership before he took office. He was still learning and listening while he cleaned up his gubernatorial affairs in New York. Stopping off in Washington on trips to Warm Springs and back, he talked at length with congressional leaders, and found the Democrats as factionalized as ever. He tried to hold off pressure from the left. He received and listened attentively to a left-wing delegation planning a hunger march in Washington, but avoided taking a stand. “When I talk to him he says ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’” grumbled Huey Long. “But Joe Robinson”— Senate Majority Leader and the Kingfish’s bête noire—“goes to see him the next day and again he says ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’ Maybe he says ‘Fine!’ to everybody.” Roosevelt did—to almost everybody—and visitors left with the feeling he agreed with them when he had meant simply that he understood them.
The one man with the constitutional authority and responsibility to lead was politically impotent as a lame duck. Herbert Hoover, however, was by no means eager to surrender leadership. When Britain asked the President for suspension of World War I debt payments to the United States and for a review of the whole debt situation, Hoover invited Roosevelt to discuss the matter with him. The President-elect was wary. He was no expert on the foreign debt question; he knew that Democratic congressional leaders were opposed to forsaking money that Europe “had hired,” in Calvin Coolidge’s words; and he wanted to maintain his own freedom of action. There followed a long and stately minuet of suspicious co-leaders, with little action.
The nation tried to size up its next President. “Your distant relative is an X in the equation,” editor William Allen White wrote to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. “He may develop his stubbornness into courage, his amiability into wisdom, his sense of superiority into statesmanship. Responsibility is a winepress that brings forth strange juices out of men.” Wrote Lippmann earlier: “His good-will no one questions. He has proved that he has the gift of political sagacity. If only he will sail by the stars and not where the winds of opinion will take him, he will bring the ship into port.”
The nation seemed to hunger for leadership—but what kind of leadership? Europe provided some models. In Germany, on January 30—Roosevelt’s fifty-first birthday—a befuddled President von Hindenburg designated as Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who promptly dissolved the Reichstag, called an election, locked up opposition leaders, and terrorized the voters with an ersatz panic. Mussolini’s Italy was shipping arms to Austrian fascists. In the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin was still mercilessly crushing his party opponents.
“The situation is critical, Franklin,” Lippmann told the President-elect during a visit to Warm Springs. He reminded Roosevelt that Hitler had come to power over a paralyzed executive and deadlocked parliament. His host as usual was vague about specific plans. Two weeks later Lippmann wrote in his column that Congress should give the new President a free hand by refraining from debate and amendment for a year. Just at this time the nation was reminded of the explosive forces lying under the surface when Joseph Zangara, an unemployed bricklayer, took a shot at Roosevelt in Miami, missed him, and mortally wounded the mayor of Chicago, who was riding in an open car with the President-elect. “I do not hate Mr. Roosevelt personally,” Zangara said, “I hate all Presidents … and I hate all officials and everybody who is rich.”
About this time a very rich man, Henry Ford, was refusing the pleas of White House emissaries to help bail out two Michigan banks in which the automaker had millions of dollars of deposits. Let the crash come, Ford said. Soon the governor of Michigan proclaimed a bank holiday—and a ripple of fear spread through the nation. Once again Hoover sought to involve Roosevelt in an economic decision, urging him to assure the country that there would be no “tampering or inflation of the currency,” that the budget would be balanced and government credit maintained. Roosevelt would not repudiate the “new deal” that he was slowly shaping. In a last desperate try, Hoover in two late-night phone calls on the eve of Inaugural Day asked Roosevelt whether he would endorse a White House executive order controlling bank withdrawals. The President-elect would not—the President must act on his own. As the White House clock struck midnight, Hoover said, “We are at the end of our string.”
The government was paralyzed as the nation’s financial structure seemed close to toppling. Ashen-faced bankers, sitting late in their offices totaling withdrawals, wondered whether their banks would pull through. On March 3 over $100 million in gold was withdrawn from the Treasury. Governor Herbert Lehman declared a banking holiday in New York. Illinois followed. As the Hoovers’ bags were being packed in the White House, the fear that had been sweeping through the nation turned into panic.
A poem by Robert Sherwood appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature:
Plodding feet
Tramp—tramp
The Grand Old Army’s
Breaking Camp.
Blare of bugles
Din—din
The New Deal is moving in.…
But where’s the army of the unemployed?
One would think they’d be overjoyed
To join this pageant of renown—
These festive rites.…
Washington, D.C., March 4, 1933. Perched on the icy branches of the gaunt trees overlooking the Capitol’s east front, they waited for the ceremony to which they had no tickets: an old man in ancient, patched-up green tweeds; a pretty young redhead in a skimpy coat; an older woman in rags, her face lined with worry and pain; a college boy whose father was jobless. They watched the crowd below as rumors drifted through that Roosevelt had been shot, that the whole area was covered by army machine guns. The older woman prayed on her tree limb: “No more trouble, please, God. No more trouble.”
They watched as dignitaries straggled down the Capitol steps: Herbert Hoover, morose and stony-faced; Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, his white beard fluttering a bit in the cold wind; Vice President Garner, shivering without an overcoat; finally Franklin D. Roosevelt, moving down the steps with agonizing slowness on the arm of his son James. They watched as the new President took the oath of office, his hand lying on the 300-year-old Roosevelt family Bible, open at Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians: “though I have faith …and have not charity, I am nothing.” And they watched as, still unsmiling, he gripped the rostrum firmly and looked out at the crowd.
“I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels.” The cold wind riffled the pages of his text.
“This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.” The President’s words rang out across the plaza. “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
The great crowd stood in almost dead silence. Chin outthrust, face grave, Roosevelt went on: “In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”
The crowd began to respond as it caught the cadence of the phrases: “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.…
“This Nation asks for action, and action now. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” The throng stirred to these words. The President gave the core of what would become the first New Deal programs. He touched on foreign policy only vaguely and briefly.
“In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.…”
He hoped that the Constitution, with its normal balance of presidential and congressional power, would be adequate to the crisis. But if Congress did not respond to his proposals or act on its own, and if the national emergency continued, “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” The American people wanted direct, vigorous action.
“They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes.…”
As Roosevelt ended, he was still grim; but his face lighted up when the crowd seemed to come to life. The old man in the tree had broken into tears. “It was very, very solemn, and a little terrifying,” Eleanor Roosevelt said later to reporters in the White House. “The crowds were so tremendous, and you felt that they would do anything—if only someone would tell them what to do.”
Someone would. The new President had no sooner reviewed the inaugural parade and hosted a White House reception for a thousand guests than he swore in his cabinet en masse upstairs in the Oval Room. Washington had come alive with rumor and hope. Even while couples waltzed gaily at the inaugural balls, haggard men conferred hour after hour in the huge marble buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue. Republican holdovers and Democrats newly arrived in Washington sat side by side, telephoning anxious bankers, drawing up emergency orders, all the while feeling the financial pulse of the nation and world.
With the nation’s finances paralyzed the new President gathered his lieutenants together for rapid action, but at his first cabinet meeting the day after the inaugural the group hardly looked like a team. After long and careful clearances with congressional and other leaders, Roosevelt had pieced together a kind of ministry of all the talents—or at least of all tastes and tendencies. Around him sat four old Wilson Jeffersonians, most notably Cordell Hull; two midwestern progressives and nominal Republicans, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes; and three New Yorkers, Jim Farley, the party and campaign expert, Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet member ever appointed, and a real Republican, the new Treasury Secretary, William Woodin. Conspicuous by their absence was the party old guard; Roosevelt had not asked any of the three living Democratic presidential nominees to serve—not even his old running mate, James Cox—or any key member of the Wilson Administration save Carter Glass, who had declined the Treasury.
Later in the day Roosevelt conferred with a set of congressional leaders equally diverse in party and ideology. In a diary that he kept for two days and then gave up, Roosevelt gave the best account of the early meetings: “Conferences with Senator Glass, Hiram Johnson, Joe Robinson and Congressmen Steagall and Byrnes and Minority Leader Snell.” All approved the President’s calling a special session of Congress. “Secretary Woodin reported bankers’ representatives much at sea as to what to do. Concluded that forty-eight different methods of handling banking situation impossible. Attorney General Cummings reported favorably on power to act under 1917 law, giving the President power to license, regulate, etc., export, hoarding, earmarking of gold or currency. Based on this opinion and on emergency decided on Proclamation declaring banking holiday.” Then supper with Franklin Jr. and John before they returned to school, a talk with several reporters, a five-minute radio address for the American Legion, a late visit from Hull, and “Bed.”
The next morning this leader, so ready for action, had an unnerving experience. Wheeled over by his valet to his office in the West Wing, he was left there alone in a big empty room. “There was nothing to be seen and nothing to be heard,” as Tugwell was later to relate Roosevelt’s account. “And for a few dreadful moments he hadn’t a thought. He knew that the stimulus of human contact would break the spell; but where was everybody?” He felt physically helpless, paralyzed—but much worse, he wondered whether the national paralysis had struck to the center. “There must be buttons to push, but he couldn’t see them. He pulled out a drawer or two; they had been cleaned out.”
So he sat back in his chair and simply shouted. That shout brought his aides running. And with that shout there began what would go down in history as the “Hundred Days.”
March 5—The President declared that an “extraordinary occasion” required Congress to convene on March 9.
March 6—The President proclaimed a bank holiday. This was an act of psychological leadership. The banks already were closed, by their own action or that of the states. Roosevelt played his role of crisis leader with such skill that his action in keeping the banks closed struck people with bracing effect. The far more daunting problem was reopening the banks in a way that would help them stay open, and here, in Frank Freidel’s judgment, he had no clear idea. He relied on his own brain trusters, but even more on bankers and holdovers from the Hoover Administration— men who were cautious and conservative. The money-changers, chortled the left-wing press, were back in the temple.
March 10—The President asked Congress for authority to make “drastic economies” in government. “Too often in recent history,” he said, “liberal governments have been wrecked on rocks of loose fiscal policy.” National recovery depended on frugality. The address was straight out of the Chamber of Commerce—and Roosevelt’s Pittsburgh campaign promises. Caught by surprise, lobbyists for veterans’ groups wired their state and local bodies that benefits were in danger. The Democratic leadership in the House put down a revolt among the rank and file.
March 13—Beer! The President urged on Congress the legalization of the manufacture and sale of beer and light wines—the first step toward the repeal of the Volstead Act.
March 16—The President asked for a “new means to rescue agriculture”—an Agricultural Adjustment Act to hike farmers’ buying power, slacken the pressure of farm mortgages, and raise the value of farm loans made by banks. It was none too soon. Angry farmers took matters into their own hands even as the bill was debated. Mobs of Iowans stopped eviction sales, manhandled bank agents and special deputies, fought with National Guard troops. In one town a “foreclosing judge” was dragged from his bench by masked men, mauled, half-strangled by a hangman’s noose, forced to his knees, told to pray. When he entreated, “Oh Lord, I pray thee, do justice to all men,” but still would not promise to drop the foreclosure proceeding, he was left half naked, smeared with dirt and grease.
March 21—The President proposed a bill close to his own heart—a Civilian Conservation Corps that would put tens of thousands of jobless young men to work in the nation’s woodlands to protect the forests, fight floods and soil erosion—and in the process regenerate themselves and their skills. Like all big projects, he had told reporters earlier, “It is in a sense experimental, therefore we do not want to launch it on too big a scale until we know how practical it is.” Congress legislated the plan before the end of the month. In the same message the President asked for a big program of federal emergency relief to feed and clothe millions of destitute Americans; Congress gave him this bill within two months.
March 29—The President urged on Congress the federal supervision of investment securities, because of the “obligation upon us to insist that every issue of new securities to be sold in interstate commerce shall be accompanied by full publicity and information.” To the old doctrine of caveat emptor, he said, must be added the further doctrine: “Let the seller also beware.” Roosevelt had no completed bill to offer—only the services of advisers who were already battling among themselves over the bill and were soon negotiating a tangle of policy concepts and specifics with members of Congress and their staffs. There was strong support on the Hill, however, especially on the part of Sam Rayburn of Texas and other old Wilsonians, and Congress passed in May a bill levying heavy penalties for failing to file full and honest information with the government.
April 5—By executive order the President prohibited “the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates” and directed all holders of gold to turn it over to a bank, in order to strengthen the nation’s financial structure and “to give the Government that element of freedom of action” necessary as the “very basis of its monetary goal and objective.”
April 10—The President “suggested” to Congress a project as close to his heart as the CCC, and for the same reason—it would nurture both people and the environment. This was for a Tennessee Valley Authority charged with the duty of planning for the “proper use, conservation and development of the natural resources of the Tennessee River drainage basin and its adjoining territory.” In his broad vision the President saw the enterprise as transcending mere power development and encompassing flood control, soil conservation, reforestation, retirement of marginal lands, industrial distribution and diversification—“national planning for a complete river watershed.” No one more eagerly welcomed this bill on Capitol Hill than George Norris, who with liberal allies in both parties had for more than a decade fought efforts to sell the government-built Muscle Shoals dam and power plant, which would now become part of a vast program of public development, ownership, and control.
During the interregnum the President-elect had led Norris and other congressional leaders on a tour of the valley. Pulling up at the dam at Muscle Shoals, Roosevelt watched the surging waters pour through the spillway—and go to waste. He had publicly promised that now these waters would be harnessed. He called Norris up from the car behind him. “This ought to be a happy day for you, George.” It was, said Norris; “I can see my dreams coming true.” He added half aloud as he walked back to his car: “Thank God for a President who can dream dreams!” With Norris looking on exultantly, Roosevelt signed the TVA bill in mid-May.
April 13—As foreclosures rose to a thousand a day, the President asked for legislation to protect home ownership as a guarantee of economic and social stability. The government would refinance mortgages of small owners, some of whom had lost their homes as far back as 1930. Congress passed this measure with enthusiasm.
May 4—The President urged emergency railroad legislation that would establish a coordinator of transportation to help or compel carriers to avoid duplication of service and waste and encourage financial reorganizations. Both houses passed bills within a month of Roosevelt’s request.
May 17—The President sent a double recommendation to Congress— “for the machinery necessary for a great cooperative movement throughout all industry” for reemployment, a shorter working week, decent wages, and the prevention of “unfair competition and disastrous overproduction”; and for granting the President “full power to start a large program of direct employment” at a cost of about $3.3 billion. The resulting National Industrial Recovery Act was a legacy of World War I mobilization and the 1920s trade association movement, and the immediate product of brainstorming and horse-trading among an unusually large number of advisers and politicians in the legislature and the executive. Offering enticements to labor as well as capital, the bill was assailed from both right and left on Capitol Hill and barely survived the Senate gantlet. “History probably will record the National Industrial Recovery Act,” said Roosevelt when he signed it on June 16, “as the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress.”
So with that signing ended the Hundred Days—a policy explosion without precedent in American history—but of what enduring effect none could foresee.
At the center of the action sat Franklin Roosevelt, presiding, instructing, wheedling, persuading, enticing, pressuring, negotiating, manipulating, conceding, horse-trading, placating, mediating—leading and following, leading and misleading. People marveled how the President, his cigarette holder deployed more jauntily than ever, appeared to bounce and skip through the day, despite his inability to walk, as he punctuated solemn conferences with jests, long and somewhat imaginary stories, and great booming laughter. While still in bed in the morning, his large torso looming over legs that hardly ribbed the sheets, he spouted ideas, questions, instructions to his aides. Wheeled over to the west wing, he swung into his office chair for long hours of visitors, letters, telephone calls, emergency sessions.
Calvin Coolidge had allegedly disposed of visitors by a simple formula: “Don’t talk back to ’em.” Roosevelt used talk as a tool of influence, outtalking his advisers, outtalking department heads, even outtalking visiting senators.
The President soon proved himself an artist in government—in his fine sense of timing, his adroit application of pressure, his face-to-face persuasiveness, his craft in playing not only foes but friends off against one another. Like a creative artist, Frances Perkins said, he would begin his picture “without a clear idea of what he intends to paint or how it shall be laid out upon the canvas, and then, as he paints, his plan evolves out of the material he is painting.” He could think and feel his way into political situations with imagination, intuition, insight.
These traits dominated his policy thinking as well as his political calculating—and with less success. People close to Roosevelt were dismayed by his casual and disorderly intellectual habits. To Adolf Berle his judgments of people and ideas were “primarily instinctive and not rational,” his learning came not from books but from people. He read not books but newspapers, perhaps half a dozen before breakfast—devoured them “like a combine eating up grain,” a friend noted. He was not so much a creator of ideas as a broker of them. He did not assemble his ideas into a comprehensive and ordered program, with priorities and interconnections. Just as he lived each day for itself, as he liked to tell friends, so he appeared to flirt with each idea as it came along.
Everything seemed to conspire to fortify these intellectual habits of the new President—his eclectic education and reading, the ideologically divided party he led, the factionalized Congress he confronted, above all the advisers he had chosen and who had chosen him. His chief brain truster during 1933 was Ray Moley. Prickly and hard-driving, the former Columbia professor—now Assistant Secretary of State—shared some of his boss’s political shrewdness and opportunism, intuitive judgment, and keenness in evaluating friend and foe. But Roosevelt also talked at length with Berle about banking, railroad, and monetary problems, and Berle’s ideas for raising business to a higher level of efficiency and responsibility; with Tugwell about conservation, agriculture, and industrial discipline, and Tugwell’s notions of democratic planning of the economy.
These brain trusters had their differences, but they seemed three of a kind compared with Roosevelt’s other advisers, formal and informal: his old-time Hudson Valley friend and neighbor Henry Morgenthau, humanitarian by heritage and sensibility but cautiously conservative in economic policy; budget director Lewis Douglas, absolutely dedicated to governmental penny-pinching and fiscal orthodoxy; Treasury Under Secretary Dean Acheson, close to Douglas in his economics; Jesse Jones, Texas business mogul who now ran the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Another broad influence on Roosevelt was the lively correspondence and visitation with Felix Frankfurter, who discreetly spoke for Justice Brandeis’s bias against economic and governmental giantism even as the Harvard Law School professor helped people Washington agencies with young activists who would make their own diverse marks in coming months.
Most remarkable of all was that one-woman brain trust, Eleanor Roosevelt—and all the more influential for not being viewed in that role. Through quick visits to her husband while he was still breakfasting in bed, little chits and memos, thick reports infiltrated into the executive offices, the visitors she invited to the White House, and her own influence on public opinion and Washington attitudes, she soon became a penetrating voice for the humanitarian liberal-left. Through a wide correspondence— she received 300,000 pieces of mail the first year—her press conferences and newspaper columns, her speeches and magazine articles, her widely advertised (and criticized) trips to CCC camps and coal mines, she began to build up a potentially powerful constituency of her own. Historian Mary Beard wrote admiringly of her ability to give “inspiration to the married, solace to the lovelorn, assistance to the homemaker, menus to the cook, and help to the educator, direction to the employer, caution to the warrior, and deeper awareness of its primordial force to the ‘weaker sex.’” The First Lady also served as a model for other women in Washington government. Her close friend Frances Perkins, with her labor and urban concerns and constituencies, had special access to both Roosevelts, and women like Molly Dewson of the Democratic National Committee learned that they could be, all at the same time, competent, caring, and controversial.
Such was the flux and flow of advice to the President that no one really knew which advisers were influential or why or when. Who was having the President’s ear at the moment provoked jealousies worthy of the royal courts of old. The President’s mind seemed awesomely accessible—to the kitchen cabinet, to department heads like Ickes and Perkins, to experts coming through Washington. The President would be seen talking animatedly with men regarded by the orthodox—though not necessarily by history—as quacks.
Roosevelt was following no set course, left, right, or center. He was leading by guess and by God. He not only admitted to playing by ear but boasted of it. He was a football quarterback, he told reporters, calling a new play after he saw how the last one turned out. Snap judgments had to be made. But Washington wondered what lay back of the snap judgments—some ideology or philosophy?
Neither of these, but rather a loose collection of values—Roosevelt’s warm humanitarianism, his belief that the needy must be helped, that government must step in when private institutions could not do the job, and that now—in 1933—this meant the federal government. The President also had a fine grasp of political and governmental nuts and bolts. But between the two levels of grand philosophy and policy specifics he would be experimental, eclectic, nonprogrammatic, nondoctrinaire. He would be a broker of ideas as well as of interests and individuals.
As a master broker Roosevelt presided over a grand concert of interests. Labor, farmers, businessmen, investors, unemployed youth, some of the poor—all got a slice of the first New Deal, at least on paper. FDR assumed the role of bipartisan leader, “president of all the people,” virtually the national father. He happily cited a Nebraska congressman’s definition of the New Deal as an effort “to cement our society, rich and poor, manual worker and brain worker, into a voluntary brotherhood of freemen, standing together, striving together, for the common good of all.” Government, he told a convention of bankers, was “essentially the outward expression of the unity and the leadership of all groups.” All this seemed a long cry from the “discipline and direction under leadership” he had promised in his inaugural address.
Congress, though more responsive to regional and special interests, quickened to the energy that radiated from the President. Even some Republicans fell over themselves to express support for the Democratic Roosevelt. In many respects the Chief Executive was Chief Legislator. Congress was by no means supine. Conservative Democratic senators like Carter Glass and Harry F. Byrd of Virginia usually opposed the President’s bills. Congress as a whole, however, was more positive than even Roosevelt toward the New Deal. Many congressmen wanted more inflation than Roosevelt, ampler spending for people’s needs, greater generosity to veterans and farmers, bigger public works, tougher policies toward Wall Street. The President skillfully brokered with the congressional left. For the conservative Democrats in the Senate he had growing hostility. Byrd opposed the AAA, FDR told Tugwell, because, as an apple grower, “he’s afraid you’ll force him to pay more than ten cents an hour for his apple pickers.”
As master broker Roosevelt for a time could stay above the political and ideological battles raging around him. In the distribution of good things— whether government money or patronage jobs or social policy or his smile of approval—he could act as transactional leader within the existing system. He might give TVA to the left and economy to the right, but as a compromising broker rather than ideological leader he would not move decisively left or right. Social justice, he said, “ought not to consist of robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
It all seemed to work beautifully for a time. Employment, prices, income all soared in the weeks after the Hundred Days. The industrial production index nearly doubled from March to July. Unemployment fell off from around 15 million at the time of Roosevelt’s inaugural to about 11 million in October, a drop in the jobless rate from about 30 to about 22 percent.
Roosevelt’s popularity floated high on this first gust of recovery. “If he burned down the capitol,” said Will Rogers, “we would cheer and say, ‘well, we at least got a fire started anyhow.’”
He won praise from Bertie McCormick’s Republican Chicago Tribune and William Randolph Hearst’s New York American. Daily, White House mailmen hauled in sacks of mail, most of it laudatory, some of it fulsome. An adviser found the President happily leafing through a sheaf of this mail. He was sorting letters he had received from British subjects addressing him as “Your Majesty” or “Lord Roosevelt” or in other monarchical terms. Why? He wanted to send them to King George V for his “amusement.” History has not recorded that His Majesty was amused.
Psychology overwhelmed economics. In sad reality at least 10 million Americans remained jobless in 1933, and industrial production was still far below that of the prosperity years and even the first year of the depression. In October 3 million families—at least 12 million people—still depended on unemployment relief of about $23 a month, which covered food but left little or nothing for rent and utilities. But people felt better—and this was largely Roosevelt’s doing. He exuded cheerfulness. He raised hopes and expectations. Above all, he acted; for several months he simply dominated the front pages of the nation’s newspapers with his speeches, bill-signings, trips, executive orders, pronunciamentos.
His fireside chats carried his buoyant presence directly into home and hearth. “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking,” he said at the start of his first fireside chat in mid-March. “I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.” And he proceeded to do just that, in simple, human terms. Read later in cold print, the chats seemed a bit limp and pedestrian. Read by Roosevelt over the radio, they sounded warm, intimate, homely. Watching him deliver a fireside chat, Frances Perkins sensed that he could actually see the families listening at the other end. “His face would smile and light up as though he were actually sitting on the front porch or in the parlor with them.” The President took care not to overuse this device, giving only four chats the first year, at two- or three-month intervals.
Nor did he overstrain the press conference as a way of reaching people. He held these twice a week, to the joy of the White House press corps, but the sessions were often more frustrating than rewarding to the reporters. Roosevelt was a master at withholding information. He spent much of the half hour jovially fencing and parrying with the reporters, or offering them tidbits, or lecturing them. Crowding around the President’s gadget-covered desk, the correspondents pressed him hard, with mixed results. Roosevelt wanted to control the flow of information, to create his own sensations, to set his own timing. He was not the first or the last President to do all this; he was simply more effective than most.
Nothing epitomized the New Deal in action better than the National Recovery Act and Administration—epitomized Roosevelt’s Concert of Interests, his role of broker, the psychological impact of the Hundred Days, the fundamental problems of the “broker state” at work. As boss of NRA, Roosevelt chose General Hugh Johnson, who was a mass of contradictions himself—outwardly a tough old cavalryman with a leathery face, squint eyes, and a rough bark of a voice, inwardly an amalgam of public commitment, touchy ego, maudlin sentimentality, business savvy, and as clamorous and picturesque as a sideshow barker. The general’s first job was to persuade employers to draw up codes of fair competition, a task he attacked like a cavalry charge. Once approved by the President and given the force of law, the codes were designed to discourage wasteful, junglelike competition by setting more orderly pricing and marketing policies, and to benefit workers by establishing higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, and the end of child labor. As part of the deal, antitrust policies would be softened so that businessmen could cooperate in setting up the codes. Code signers could affix the “Blue Eagle” label to products and shopwindows.
With Johnson as bugler, the NRA galvanized the American people like a national call to arms. Suddenly the Blue Eagle was everywhere—on magazine covers, in the movies, on girls in chorus lines. (But not on Ford cars; Henry Ford perversely refused to sign the automobile code, then lived up to it anyway.) Rushing from city to city in an army plane, dishing out Boy Scout-style enthusiasm, biting criticism, and wisecracks at every stop, Johnson pressured and coaxed businessmen to endorse the codes, then gathered them in Washington for the signing and orating. As the very personification of recovery, the general staged a monster Blue Eagle parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue. For hours he reviewed the parade of a quarter million persons, with another million and a half cheering from the sidewalks. Not since 1917 had Americans savored such a throbbing sense of marching unity.
As the months passed, though, the questions became more and more urgent: Unity for what? Marching to where? Under pressure for quick results, Johnson dealt with the business and labor leaders closest at hand, those who were most vocal, best organized, most skillful in dealing with bureaucrats and politicians. Inevitably he delegated crucial pricing and production decisions to the dominant interests, which often turned out to be the biggest corporations. The NRA was becoming a breeder of monopoly, charged Senator Gerald Nye. Who would speak for unorganized consumers? A Consumers’ Advisory Board was set up but without adequate political muscle; its members, Tugwell said, were “spearheads without shafts.”
Union labor, being organized, fared better under NRA. Section 7(a) of the act boldly proclaimed that employees “shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers” in choosing their representatives. No one seeking or holding a job “shall be required as a condition of employment to join any company union or to refrain from joining, organizing, or assisting a labor organization of his own choosing.” Union leaders greeted this as labor’s Magna Carta—comparable to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, said John L. Lewis—and the message was clear: Organize, “THE PRESIDENT WANTS YOU TO JOIN A UNION,” placards read. “Forget about injunctions, yellow dog contracts, black lists and the fear of dismissal.” But there were complications. President William Green and the American Federation of Labor old guard wanted to organize workers into separate craft unions, even in huge auto plants, while Lewis and the rising young militants around him wanted to organize all the workers in a plant or company or industry into big, solid industrial unions.
Employers bridled at 7(a). Many set up company unions—or “employee representation plans”—which came to be run by company stooges. Labor responded with a rash of strikes during the summer of 1933; by September nearly 300,000 workers had walked out. The “concert of interests” seemed to be emitting discordant noises. “N.R.A. means National Run Around,” read a sign hoisted on a picket line. The President set up special boards, trimmed NRA’s power, eased Johnson out, and put in more domesticated chiefs, but to little avail; during 1934 the NRA eagle fluttered through heavy weather.
In the end the significance of the National Recovery Administration was not its impact on economic recovery, which was mixed, but its curbing of child labor, sweatshops, and unfair trade practices, its big boost to unionization and its modest protection to consumers. Why then was the NRA finally dismissed as a failure, even privately by Roosevelt himself? Largely because it failed in its highly touted supreme aim of bringing capital, labor, and other interests into a happy concert under the “Broker State,” and by artificially raising prices and restricting production, it only marginally helped produce recovery.
If the Concert of Interests did not work, what would? Public works, the companion piece to the NRA, was launched with little of the drama of the Blue Eagle, under the leadership of one of the most committed and stouthearted New Dealers, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Touchy and cantankerous, suspicious of friend and foe—and especially of government contractors—“Honest Harold” did not hesitate to use government snoopers to check on suspect PWA employees and their financial connections. Ickes was in no great hurry; his big projects needed careful planning and budgeting as well as laborious scrutiny by the secretary himself When the public works program finally got underway it built gas and electric power plants, jails and hospitals, sewage and water systems, bridges, docks, and tunnels—and aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, army and navy airplanes. But the $9 billion that PWA ultimately spent were not central to recovery during Roosevelt’s first two years.
Much quicker to get underway was the federal relief program under a lanky young ex-director of private welfare programs named Harry Hopkins, who acted almost as fast as he talked. Appointed Federal Emergency Relief Administrator with a grant of half a billion dollars, Hopkins began authorizing millions of dollars in relief even while he was wailing in a hallway to be moved into his office. Since he could give money only to the state and local public relief agencies, which in turn administered relief programs, he could do little more than monitor the levels of compassion and competence with which programs were carried out. Behind his cynical, wisecracking façade Hopkins was deeply concerned with guarding the dignity, pride, and self-esteem of people on relief. Hence he was eager that the unemployed be given jobs and not merely handouts, but job programs cost more money. Late in 1933 Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt to launch a massive crash program to employ 4 million. In its brief existence, the Civil Works Administration undertook the building or rebuilding of vast numbers of roads, parks, schools, playgrounds, swimming pools, and other “light,” short-term projects, in contrast to the PWA’s “heavy” jobs.
It was this massive spending on work relief, supplemented by that of the PWA, the TVA, the CCC, the AAA, and other programs, that in 1933 and 1934 provided the central thrust of the early New Deal. It was not really planned that way; Roosevelt was responding not to grand ideology or to grand economics but to sheer human needs that he recognized and that Eleanor Roosevelt, Hopkins, Perkins, and the others brought to him. This was part of Roosevelt’s political strength in the face of the bewildering problems of 1933 and 1934: the ability to follow ad hoc, expedient policies; to mediate between liberals and moderates, ideologues and politicians, spenders and economizers; to move so quickly and deftly from policy to policy, posture to posture, as to keep his adversaries guessing and off balance; and hence to avoid being cornered by left or right—all the while helping millions of people in need.
Was this oscillating middle way also the President’s weakness? Instead of standing above the contending groups in society his administration often became part of the struggle, even sundered by it. By trying to do so many different—even competing—things, he did few that were adequate to the desperate needs. In trying to be both budget-balancer and provider, he satisfied neither the economizers nor those who believed that only a truly massive spending program would produce a massive recovery. By flirting with groups and movements stretched across the political spectrum he lost an opportunity to mobilize and lead forces arrayed from a “little left of center” to the far left. Perhaps the basic problem was one of intellectual grasp. “Roosevelt had a cogent overall interpretation of presidential leadership,” in James Sargent’s judgment, but the “disorder and ambiguity of his thought and expression” intruded when he “attempted to transfer his general thinking to specific proposals and actions.” Thus, in December 1933 the President told a press conference that “somewhere” between Douglas’s efforts to economize and “those who want to spend ten billion additional on public works, we will get somewhere.…”
In foreign policy, where Presidents usually have a freer hand, Roosevelt was equally vigorous, versatile, volatile—and opportunistic. At heart still an old Wilsonian, he had made enough concessions to Hearst and other nationalists to leave himself in an ambivalent position from the start of his administration. In choosing Cordell Hull for Secretary of State he was recognizing a man who had made no secret of his hope to crown his lifework for expanded trade and economic cooperation among nations. But in his domestic policies, with the backing of Moley, Tugwell, and others, the President was seeking a moderate rise in farm and industrial prices, which he did not want washed out by an inundation of cheap goods from abroad. Moreover, he had inherited a dubious bequest from Hoover: to take part in an International Monetary and Economic Conference set for London in the early summer, which might conflict with his early decision to go off the gold standard and his plan to free his monetary policy— especially his moderate “reflation” efforts—from entanglement with the international gold standard.
Roosevelt’s approach to the London Conference reflected his crossed purposes and mixed counsel in foreign affairs. Despite his skepticism about the London gathering, he threw himself into the posture of world leader by receiving foreign representatives, including British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, at the White House in April. Rosy pieties at these meetings raised hopes for the conference. Then the President sent to London a delegation headed by Hull but including also such protectionists as Senator Key Pittman of Nevada; the President had even tried to enlist the Senate’s supreme isolationist, Hiram Johnson, who shrewdly declined. In London the American delegation wandered in a fog of confusion which was only intensified by Roosevelt’s belated dispatch of Moley as “liaison” and ultimately, apparently, as possible fall guy. Suddenly there arrived a sharp message from Roosevelt in effect scolding the delegates for trifling with efforts for an artificial and temporary monetary stability and for ignoring fundamental ills. Confounded, the conference limped on for a few weeks and then quit, amid sharp recriminations and general hopelessness.
Roosevelt’s torpedoing of the conference did not usher in wholly nationalist policies, however; he preferred to keep dual strategies in play. In the fall he set up a committee of low-tariff men to prepare a bill for the 1934 session of Congress. On their recommendation Roosevelt asked Congress for presidential authority to make commercial agreements with foreign nations under which rates could be revised 50 percent either way. The passage of this bill was a triumph for Hull’s internationalism.
But what about Roosevelt’s? In the fall of 1933 he was still pursuing the nationalist economic policies for which his London Conference “bombshell message” had freed him. One of these policies was to shore up domestic prices by buying gold—a device that had been sold the President by a monetary theorist. So for some weeks there occurred a most extraordinary episode in presidential history—the President of the United States meeting every morning with his new Acting Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to set the price of gold. Since edging prices upward rather than any precise figure was the aim, Roosevelt could rather arbitrarily set the figure within a certain range. Once when he proposed to Morgenthau an increase to twenty-one cents, he twitted the solemn secretary by explaining, “It’s a lucky number, because it’s three times seven.”
Also in the fall, however, Roosevelt brought off what in history might rank as potentially the most significantly internationalist act of all—recognition of the Soviet Union. This action followed lengthy haggling over terms, Washington holding out hopes for expanded trade and Moscow making vague promises to stop abetting revolutionary activity in the United States and to protect the right of free religious worship of Americans in Russia. Eleanor Roosevelt liked to tell of visiting a schoolroom where the Soviet Union had been blacked out—actually “whited out”—on a map of the world, leaving only a void. Roosevelt now had begun to fill that void.
To some inside the Roosevelt administration the New Deal by summer 1934 appeared in disarray, if not chaos. “Public works” was almost at a full stop, Berle observed, and NRA rapidly disintegrating. “We have an administration in very bad shape indeed.” Key officials, especially on the right, were quitting the administration. Lewis Douglas left in August and Acheson was preparing to leave. Some projects failed or badly faltered: the gold purchase venture; an effort by Ickes to impose some order in the chaotic oil industry; an effort by the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation to provide food for the needy and to stabilize the commodity markets. The last two of these fell afoul of industry pressures and fragmentation. The President’s abrupt cancellation of private carriers’ airmail contracts on the grounds of collusion and the assumption by the Air Corps of the flying of the mails led to a series of plane crashes and pilot deaths in the February 1934 storms—a much-publicized disaster that might have brought down a less popular President.
The public as a whole had quite a different view of the administration. It saw a President who was doing his damnedest, quick to confront specific problems, brilliant at explaining his deeds and hopes, always positive, exuberant, seemingly on top of things. The public saw a leader.
For that public the ultimate test was economic recovery, and the flush of prosperity felt strong by fall 1934, compared to the miseries of March 1933. Could “bucks” be converted to ballots? A third of the senators and all the representatives were up for reelection. Roosevelt’s tactic was to stand above the party battle, in line with his bipartisan posture of “leader of all the people.” But he helped friendly candidates indirectly, and he posed the campaign issue by asking in a fireside chat, “Are you better off than you were last year? Are your debts less burdensome? Is your bank account more secure? Are your working conditions better? Is your faith in your own individual future more firmly grounded?”
The result was a resounding verdict for the President and his New Deal. Typically Presidents lost ground in midterm congressional elections, but in 1934 Democratic strength rose from 313 to 322 in the House and— incredibly—from 59 to 69 in the Senate. A clutch of highly conservative Republican senators was sacked. “Some of our friends think the majority top-heavy,” Garner wrote the President, “but if properly handled, the House and Senate will be all right and I am sure you can arrange that.”
Next month a late vote came in from Britain. “The courage, the power and the scale” of Roosevelt’s effort, wrote Winston Churchill, “must enlist the ardent sympathy of every country, and his success could not fail to lift the whole world forward into the sunlight of an easier and more genial age.” The British Conservative was seeking to place Roosevelt in the broadest sweep of history.
“Roosevelt is an explorer who has embarked on a voyage as uncertain as that of Columbus, and upon a quest which might conceivably be as important as the discovery of the New World.”