THE WINTER OF 1934 was the hardest time of all, the young factory worker said. At one point the family ate only potatoes and dog meat. “We sold everything we could except the piano. Mama wouldn’t let that go.… All of us had taken our music lessons on it—especially my sister, the one who died when I was little. I guess that was the real reason Mama wouldn’t let it go.”
In Macon County, Georgia, the NRA meant to many blacks “Negro Removal Act” or “Negro Rarely Allowed,” and to some whites “Negro Relief Act” or “No Roosevelt Again.”
In a country town outside Boston a decorous bridge party ended up in merriment and highjinks, with the ladies scissoring off their partners’ long neckties just below the knot. “I hope that wasn’t your best tie, Charles,” the hostess joked. Charles was an MIT graduate now ekeing out a living from a chicken farm. “My dear,” he said with a tight smile, “it was my only one.”
“Close to me four children moved up and down the row with nimble fingers” picking currants, a jobless writer related. “The parents scolded or cajoled as the hot day wore on and the kids whined or sulked under the monotonous work. Their ages ranged from six to twelve or thirteen.” Two younger girls tended a baby on a blanket under a tree. “For one day’s work of nearly ten hours the father collected for himself, his wife, and four children $2.44.”
From Florida a Du Pont in-law and vice president indignantly wrote a friend: “A cook on my houseboat at Fort Myers quit because the government was paying him a dollar an hour as a painter.”
An Indiana housewife wrote to the local newspaper about living on $1.50 a week. “Those in charge of relief have never known actual hunger and want.… Just what does our government expect us to do when our rent is due? When we need a doctor? …It is always the people with full stomachs who tell us poor people to keep happy.”
J. P. Morgan’s family often warned visitors not to mention Roosevelt’s name to the old man—it might raise his blood pressure to dangerous heights. It was not safe to mention any Roosevelt. When someone had let fall the name of Theodore Roosevelt, Morgan had burst out, “God damn all Roosevelts!”
In Garden City, Kansas, the skies blackened as whirlwinds of black dust beat on the farmhouses. “The doors and windows were all shut tightly, yet those tiny particles seemed to seep through the very walls. It got into cupboards and clothes closets; our faces were as dirty as if we had rolled in the dirt; our hair was gray and stiff and we ground dirt between our teeth.”
A community sing in a migratory labor camp in California hymned an old sharecropper’s lament:
Eleven Cent cotton and forty cent meat
How in the world can a poor man eat?
Flour up high, cotton down low,
How in the world can you raise the dough?
Clothes worn out, shoes run down,
Old slouch hat with a hole in the crown.…
These were the voices of some Americans not during the Hoover depression but a year or two after Roosevelt’s Hundred Days. Overall, the statistics looked good. New private and public construction put in place rose from $2.9 billion in 1933 to $3.7 billion in 1934 and $4.2 billion in 1935. Average weekly earnings of production workers went up from $16.65 in 1933 to $18.20 the next year and $19.91 the year after that. Unemployment fell in these same years from 12.8 million to 11.3 to 10.6. But these improvements looked almost pathetic compared with the 1929 figures—only 1.5 million jobless that year, weekly paychecks of almost $25 for factory workers, nearly $11billion in construction. As usual, women did worse than men and improved their lot more slowly. Roosevelt’s central goal and promise—recovery—had been only fractionally accomplished.
Yet the smell and feel of a strong recovery lasted for at least a year after the Hundred Days. Roosevelt’s exuberance, experimentation, concern— above all, the sheer range and variety of his activism—symbolized a nation on the march, looking forward. And there had been so much change and progress in so many areas: NRA had begun to bring some order and equity to what had been pure jungle conflict; depositors’ savings were safe; millions of the poor were receiving relief jobs or at least relief; magnificent projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority had been launched; the government was policing—or at least monitoring—Wall Street; farm income had been boosted and stabilized; new conservation programs were underway; the sight of the dispossessed family huddling outside its ancestral home while the slick-talking auctioneer sold it off was far less common across the great agricultural regions of the nation.
Yet millions of people were still in dire want—all the more so because promises from Washington and state capitals had sharpened their hopes and appetites. The President was now caught up in one of the most dynamic and compelling transformational situations that a free people can experience. Not only did the basic wants exist in harrowing abundance; they had been acknowledged and legitimated by the New Dealers to the point that now they had become publicly recognized needs. As political leaders made more promises, offered more assurances, aroused more hope, these needs were converted into popular expectations that were addressed back to the leaders—any leaders. And as leaders sought followers, as politicians competed for votes, popular expectations changed into feelings of entitlement and in turn into demands by followers on leaders. Who then would become the true leaders?
“In the summer of 1933, a nice old gentleman wearing a silk hat fell off the end of a pier. He was unable to swim. A friend ran down the pier, dived overboard and pulled him out: but the silk hat floated off with the tide. After the old gentleman had been revived, he was effusive in his thanks. He praised his friend for saving his life. Today, three years later, the old gentleman is berating his friend because the silk hat was lost.”
Roosevelt was a bit disingenuous in telling this story. Having watched the counterattack of leaders of finance on both Cousin Ted’s and Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism, he could hardly have been astonished that capitalists would turn against the New Deal. Still, he was genuinely perplexed as to why the right-wing counterattack came so quickly, and in such angry and often ugly form. As the master conductor of the concert of interests, had he not responded to business needs—in his stern call for economy, his refusal to support left-wing proposals such as the socialization of banking, his early insistence on self-liquidating public works, his initial coolness even to federal guarantee of bank deposits, his defiance of the American Legion on veterans’ pensions? Had he not received praise from such diverse conservatives as Henry L. Stimson, Walter Lippmann, and Hamilton Fish, such conservative newspapers as The Wall Street Journal and the Hearst chain? Had not the NRA and other measures tried to be evenhanded between capital and labor?
Many on the right were not placated by these measures, and their fury rose in the months after the Hundred Days. In his speeches and posture, if not always in his policies, Roosevelt was challenging some of the fundamental values of the old American right—its definition of liberty as freedom from governmental regulation and control, its belief in individualism in contrast to the “collectivist” NRA and AAA, its attachment to laissez faire and limited government in contrast to the leviathan that Roosevelt seemed to be erecting, its championship of thrift in public spending, its reverence for the Constitution and the checks and balances designed to frustrate popular majorities seeking to control the presidency and Congress. Some of the more venerable spokesmen for American conservatism in the 1930s had sat in Yale and other classrooms when Spencerian Social Darwinism—above all, the belief that progress emerges out of competition and the struggle for survival—had been relayed by the likes of William Graham Sumner and other eminent teachers.
It was inevitable that these powerful men would come into conflict with the President unless he hewed to a conservative line—and Roosevelt the improviser and experimenter would hew to no ideology during the early New Deal. Rumblings on the right began to be heard by late 1933. An organized counterattack on the New Deal was developing strongly by mid-1934, at a time when protest on the left—aside from socialists and communists who had been against the Administration from the start as a matter of course—was still mixed and unfocused. And leadership of the right was taken initially not by conservative Republicans or big businessmen but by Democrats.
The most notable of these Democrats was the party’s hero of the 1920s, Al Smith, who had now become the unhappiest warrior of them all. His desertion of the “collectivist” New Deal signaled a poignant effort of the old business leadership of the Bourbon Democracy, now aided by disaffected urbanites, to hold the Democratic party to its earlier “Jeffersonian” ways. John J. Raskob, a close friend of Smith’s, had retired from active directorship of General Motors in 1928 to head up both the Democratic-National Committee and the Smith campaign. After Smith’s defeat Raskob and Jouett Shouse, a Kansas newspaper editor and politico, ran the party. Roosevelt’s vanquishing of Smith at the 1932 Democratic convention left both Raskob and Shouse in political eclipse. By early 1934 a Du Pont vice president was corresponding with Raskob about Roosevelt’s seeking to set labor against capital, buying votes from the poor, attacking corporate wealth, and other transgressions. Why not, Raskob asked the Du Pont man, set up an organization to combat the idea that businessmen were crooks and similar iniquitous notions?
From these seeds there rapidly grew a unique organization, the American Liberty League. Top men in General Motors, Du Pont, and other corporations took the lead with Raskob and Shouse in setting it up, sometimes meeting with Smith in his office at the Empire State Building. Most of the participants by now were Republicans, but the group secured as members of its board of directors not only Smith but the 1924 Democratic presidential nominee, John W. Davis. Heavily financed by Du Pont and other big corporations, the League by the end of summer 1934 was ready to go into action as the anti-New Deal voice of business.
Shouse first paid a courtesy call on the President in mid-August to assure him of the League’s “absolutely non-partisan character.” Roosevelt could not have been more agreeable. After hearing out Shouse’s list of objectives—chiefly the protection of enterprise and of property—the President said airily, “I can subscribe to that one hundred per cent.” He might use League people to help him prepare the next federal budget, he volunteered, and he even called in his press secretary in Shouse’s presence and instructed him to announce the President’s endorsement of the League when it went public.
As usual, Roosevelt bided his time. Late in August he told reporters amiably that Shouse had stopped by and had pulled out of his pocket a couple of “Commandments”—the need to protect property and to safeguard profits. What about other commandments? he had asked Shouse. The League said nothing about teaching respect for the rights of individuals against those who would exploit them, or the duty of government to find jobs for all those who wished to work. The President quoted a gentleman “with a rather ribald sense of humor” as saying that the League believed in two things—love God and then forget your neighbor.
Had Shouse asked him to join? a reporter asked. “I don’t think he did,” Roosevelt said with a grin. “Must have been an oversight.”
With this press-conference baiting of the League, the war was on between Roosevelt and the right. Conservative pamphlets had the New Deal putting the nation on the brink of chaos, destroying states’ rights, plunging the country into bankruptcy, leading the people into socialism, dictatorship, and tyranny. The New Deal was communist or fascist, or perhaps both. Roosevelt must have been puzzled by a question that has eluded historians for at least half a century: why such emotional intensity? Surely not because of economic deprivation; business was enjoying a moderate boom under the early New Deal. Surely not wholly because of loss of power; Roosevelt had given business leaders a voice and some influence in policy-making, albeit only as a junior partner.
Perhaps the most likely explanation is a psychological one. The vehemence of the right-wing counterattack can be seen as deriving chiefly from acute feelings of insecurity and lowered status in the business community. Roosevelt had robbed capitalists of something even more important than some of their money and their power. He had threatened their self-esteem. The men who had been the economic lords of creation now inhabited a world where political leaders were masters of headlines and recipients of deference, even adulation. Men who had claimed for themselves Righteousness and Civic Virtue, even during the Hoover depression years, now found themselves whipping boys for vote-cadging politicians—or even in the dock. Roosevelt, said a French observer, had exploded one of the most popular of American myths—he had dissociated the concept of wealth from the concept of virtue.
And Roosevelt’s own psychology? His pride and self-esteem were also at stake. He was sensitive to criticism from the right, especially from people of his own class. He wrote a Harvard classmate, a Boston banker, that he had heard of some remarks the classmate had made, and “because of what I felt to be a very old and real friendship these remarks hurt.” He wrote another friend bitterly about the “dinner-party conversations in some of the best houses in Newport.” Doubtless he felt demeaned and deserted by the same types of people who had stood apart from him in his school and college years. It was often charged, Richard Hofstadter noted, that Roosevelt was betraying his class, “but if by his class one means the whole policy-making, power-wielding stratum, it would be just as true to say that his class betrayed him.” And the President was still acting and sounding far more like a Groton gentleman than were many of his erstwhile schoolmates.
As psychology overrode economics on both sides, the business community’s intensifying feelings of guilt, apprehension, and lowered self-esteem fueled a mounting hatred for Roosevelt that began to assume pathological dimensions. He was called, privately or publicly, the Pied Piper of Hyde Park, the High Priest of Repudiation, Franklin “Deficit” Roosevelt, a Little Napoleon, Roosevelt the Tyrant, a Svengali, and of course a communist. One card that was smirkingly passed around had the caption “Can you answer the $64 Question?”:
WHAT MAN SAID TO “THAT” WOMAN?
“You kiss the negroes
I’ll kiss the Jews,
We’ll stay in the White House,
As long as we choose.”
Another card read:
THE PRESIDENT’S WIFE
IS SUING FOR DIVORCE BECAUSE
SHE IS NOT GETTING WHAT HE IS GIVING
THE OTHER PEOPLE
There developed a curious obsession with Roosevelt’s physical disability; “that cripple in the White House” was also rumored to have cancer or syphilis. But the main charge was of insanity—like fervent ideologues everywhere, his foes felt that their chief enemy could not merely be wrong; he must be crazy.
On the farthest reaches of the right—a world away from responsible conservatism—lay the political scavengers of anti-Semitism, and “Rosenfeld” became a prime target. His “Jew Deal” was run by Frankfurter, Brandeis, Baruch, Morgenthau, Cohen, and other “legal kikes.” A host of groups sprang up—white shirts, silver shirts, blue shirts—to purvey this line through speeches and pamphlets with such titles as There Is a Jewish World Plot, The Jewish New Deal, Aryan Americanism, and—inevitably—the fake Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the final proof of the international Jewish plot to take over the world. All these groups—as well as the white-sheeted Ku Klux Klan—were united by hate and fear of liberalism, socialism, and communism and by the passionate belief that the New Deal embodied these heresies.
With the Liberty League as its political action committee, American capitalism by late 1934 had declared war on the New Deal. Even more, it had declared a kind of class war on militant unions and all the hostile elements it perceived on the underside of American life. In the charges and the whispers against Roosevelt, in the hatred of the upper class for the President as a “traitor to his class,” capitalists largely initiated the very class war they imputed to Roosevelt and the left.
But where was the class enemy? The forces of labor, liberalism, and the left in 1933 and 1934 resembled more a guerrilla army living off the land than the solid ranks of the proletarian masses. For a half-century or more, labor and other groups—most dramatically the Knights of Labor in the 1880s—had made sporadic efforts to unite workers, skilled and unskilled, in a broad and durable radical movement. All had failed. A national organization mainly of craft unions, the American Federation of Labor, had come to dominate the labor field under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, apostle of business unionism. During the “business decade” of the 1920s the AFL had declined in membership and influence. During the “Hoover depression” the Federation had declined even further. No other national labor or left-wing organization yet challenged it. No political party had arisen to unite workers and farmers politically since Robert La Follette’s short-lived Progressive party of 1924.
A rash of strikes had broken out across the nation with the first flush of prosperity in 1933. As union organizers exploited NRA’s Section 7(a) and the slightly tighter labor market, workers flocked into the big AFL organizations—into Lewis’s United Mine Workers, into Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers, into David Dubinsky’s International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, into the United Textile Workers of America, and to a lesser degree into the hundreds of craft unions of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, and other skilled workers. And with more organization—and with more employers’ counterattacks against organization—came more waves of walkouts during 1934. Some strikes failed in their objectives, some succeeded—but one in particular served to arouse the fears of upper and middle classes alike. This was the San Francisco general strike of late spring 1934.
In no other city were the workers historically more militant, the employers more anti-union, and the newspaper owners—Hearst, the Knowlands—more reactionary than in the city by the Golden Gate. Few workers had sharper grievances than the longshoremen over the way the shipping companies ran the daily shape-up. Men gathered in bleak hiring halls along the Embarcadero at six in the morning, hoping to catch the eye of the dispatcher for a day’s work. This functionary could choose one man because he was a good worker, or was a cousin, or would slip him a five-spot, and send another man back into the street because he was “unreliable.” Longshoremen despised this “slave mart,” for even if chosen they remained slaves—slaves to the hook that inexorably plunged into the cargo hold and “must never hang,” that is, must never dangle idly for even a few moments.
Enflamed by this issue, the San Francisco conflict followed the classic path of escalation in the spring of 1934. The International Longshoremen’s Association demanded union recognition under the NRA; the shipping companies rejected the demand; the longshoremen struck on the Embarcadero; the companies hired strikebreakers, boarding them luxuriously on vessels; strikers hunted down scabs, kicking in their teeth or breaking their legs over a curb. Then the battle widened as the Teamsters and other unions struck in support of the longshoremen, the bosses unified their ranks through their Industrial Association of industrial, banking, railroad, and shipping interests, and more radical union leaders gained influence. Foremost of these was an intense, wiry immigrant from Australia named Harry Bridges, whose determination to win justice for labor and cynicism about ways and means had both been strengthened in the years he had spent as sailor and longshoreman.
Violence erupted when the employers sent trucks full of strikebreakers through picket lines; strikers let fly with bricks and spikes, police responded with billy sticks, tear gas, and bullets. San Francisco became a sprawling, shifting battlefield as thousands more strikers and sympathizers converged on the scene. Two men died on “Bloody Thursday”; scores, perhaps hundreds, were hurt. Now a general strike was imminent, as more and more unions fell into line.
The threat of a general strike—the nation had experienced perhaps two in its entire history—touched off widespread hysteria. The press warned of revolution and the Red Menace; rumors circulated about an imminent communist invasion of the Bay area; vigilantes smashed union offices; the mayor swore in several hundred deputy policemen; the governor called out the National Guard; Bridges and his men hung tough. Would the nation’s armed forces also be necessary? Officials turned to the Commander-in-Chief. But Roosevelt was not at his White House GHQ. He was in fact cruising Pacific waters on the USS Houston. “Everybody demanded that I sail into San Francisco Bay,” the President said later, “all flags flying and guns double shotted, and end the strike. They went completely off the handle.”
One person who had not gone off the handle was Frances Perkins. Controlling in Washington much of the communications with the President, the Secretary of Labor and her aides played down the gravity of the crisis in messages to the cruiser. She then helped arrange for a series of arbitration efforts that produced settlements by the fall. In the give-and-take of the new agreements one item stood out: the ILA alone now had the power to name the dispatcher. Despite his communist connections and rhetoric, Harry Bridges emerged as a hero of waterfront labor. But Frances Perkins, resolute and discerning under the most intense pressures, was the true heroine of deescalation.
Class war had been raging in Minneapolis in the same weeks that violence swept San Francisco. The broad pattern was much the same: employers traditionally dead set against unionization and especially the union shop; workers suffering from unemployment and low wages in the city’s great railroad, timber, iron ore, farm, and transportation industries, now battered by depression; probably the nation’s most militant workers’ leadership, headed by Ray Dunne. He had five brothers, all brought up as Roman Catholics, all unionists, several of them leftists of various hues. The escalation too followed the familiar pattern: organization of workers—in this case truck drivers—under the spur of 7(a); categorical rejection by employers of the closed shop because they could never bargain away the “workers’ liberties”; elaborate preparations on both sides for a showdown; an incident; bloody skirmishes between police with clubs and pickets with baseball bats; a truce; new tension; then “Bloody Friday”—July 20, 1934— as police with shotguns killed two strikers and left scores of others with wounds in their backsides.
Both sides had sought this showdown, but it settled nothing. As tension mounted again Governor Floyd Olson, onetime Wobbly and longtime farm-labor progressive, called in the National Guard and with fine impartiality raided first the union headquarters and then the anti-union Citizens Alliance. Both sides turned to Roosevelt, but he would not intervene— publicly. Privately he put pressure on the employers through Jesse Jones, who used as leverage the RFC’s power to give or withhold credit to Minneapolis’s beleaguered banks and businesses. Attacked on their weakest flank, the employers finally agreed to representation elections for the workers and to other concessions. The agreement left the Dunne brothers with a notable victory and also in the same kind of theoretical quandary that confronted Harry Bridges at the end: How could the State—which in the Marxist view of capitalism must of necessity reflect the interests of the ruling classes—have come ultimately to the aid of the workers? And in this case through that embodiment of Texas wealth, enterprise, and individualism, Jesse Jones?
Where union organization was weak, however, business control of the State was far more naked. Such was the case with textile workers, especially in the South. Embittered over cruelly low wages and long hours, and over the body-racking stretch-out that tied machine tenders to heavier workloads, cotton workers struck in nine states from Maine to Georgia. Over 350,000 workers walked off the job or stayed home. “The 1934 general strike in the textile industry,” according to Robert R. R. Brooks, “was unquestionably the greatest single industrial conflict in the history of American organized labor”—and it struck concomitant fear among employers. In mill towns across the South they fought back through sheriffs deputies, the National Guard, espionage, and terrorism, and the strikers suffered hundreds of casualties. In North Carolina, Roosevelt’s old boss Josephus Daniels wrote him that in almost every instance “the troops might as well have been under the direction of the mill owners.”
In the North, Rhode Island governor Theodore Green called in troops, in part because he saw the strike as virtually a communist revolt. Workers were shot down in Saylesville and Warren. The governor, nearly beside himself, called on the President to prevent communists and outlaws from “destroying cities” and marching on the statehouse. After checking with the FBI, the President took no such action. But on the other hand he gave the textile workers little help, and the big strike collapsed. Labor failed also in other big industries: steel, automobiles, tires.
Workers were facing once again a hard truth—unorganized, they were almost impotent economically and politically. This reality also confronted poorer Americans who lived on the land. Farmers who owned their own spreads in the Midwest and Northeast acted through the big farm associations like the Grange and the American Farm Bureau Federation. But sharecroppers in the South and farm workers in the West and elsewhere lacked organizational muscle. And they were suffering.
“Sharecropping, once the backbone of the South’s agricultural empire, is rapidly giving way to an even more vicious system of labor extraction,” Erskine Caldwell wrote in the mid-thirties. “The new style is driving the sharecropper away from the fertile land, away from schools for his children, away from contact with civilization. The sharecropper of yesterday is the wage worker of today, the man who peddles his brawn and muscle for twenty-five and thirty cents a day, and who is lucky if he works one day a week during the winter months, and still luckier if he can collect it in cash instead of in corn meal or old clothes.”
The AAA had aroused the hopes and expectations of sharecroppers too, but little of Washington’s money trickled down to them. Some whites and blacks, working together, formed the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union under local and outside—mainly Socialist party—leadership, only to be met with threats from farm owners, vigilantes with whips and loaded shotguns, sheriffs with arrest orders. An Arkansas preacher told a New York Times reporter: “It would have been better to have a few no-account, shiftless people killed at the start than to have all this fuss raised up.” The federal government was attacked for stirring up “niggers” to think that they would be given forty acres. To some observers blacks were still in a condition of slavery—but so were many whites.
Even more wretched than the sharecroppers were the itinerant farm workers, who had no land or place to call their own and existed in a succession of shanties and hovels, many of them lacking running water, sanitation, or even window screens. Many of these farm workers were former sharecroppers who had made their way north or west to join Arkies from Arkansas and Okies from dust-ridden Oklahoma in a vast army of wanderers. They had been infected by New Deal hopes and promises, as had their brothers and sisters in the East. In the summer of 1933 tobacco workers in the Connecticut Valley rose in indignation over their meager wages, as did cranberry pickers in the bogs of Cape Cod and citrus fruit pickers in Florida. Next year onion diggers in southern Appalachia, farm and cannery workers in New Jersey, pecan shellers in the San Antonio area, and hosts of other farm workers struck over wages and other issues. This wave of protest culminated in the spacious farmlands of California’s Imperial Valley.
The lettuce and fruit-and-vegetable workers of California not only ran the bloody gamut that had now become endemic—terrorism, vigilantes, false arrests, kidnappings, clubs, shotguns, invocation of the red menace, calling in of the troops. In California the whole union effort was savaged— organization meetings, peaceful travel by organizers, union headquarters themselves. Employer intransigence played directly into the hands of the militant union leaders, many of whom were communists. The strikes in the Imperial Valley, in Irving Bernstein’s judgment, were less a labor dispute than a “proto-Fascist offensive” by the growers and shippers and business-dominated local officials. When the southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, seeing a direct challenge to the constitutional rights of American citizens, conducted a “Good Will” tour of the valley, the group was surrounded by an angry mob in Brawley and sent back to Los Angeles.
America in 1934 was rife with upper-class hostility toward the poor. Was there to be class war? The vast majority of Americans in 1934, even those in deepest want, would have answered no. Most would have understood neither the question nor the very notion of class war. They thought in terms of their immediate boss or foreman, the bank that held their mortgage, the men who had hired them to dig potatoes or pick fruit, the minister they listened to on Sunday, their union leader if they had one. Most did not see themselves as belonging to a class. They simply knew where they stood in the distribution of food, shelter, and clothing.
Two sets of Americans, however, did understand the idea of class war, and in varying degrees expected it. American capitalists, speaking through the Liberty League, increasingly warned of the Red Menace at home and abroad, of agitators, Moscow-trained or homegrown, subverting republican institutions, of a climactic attack of a proletariat of some kind against individual liberty and free enterprise. In general, though, capitalist action was more telling than capitalist oratory. In their refusal to recognize unions of the workers’ own choosing, their resistance to labor demands, their ready use of scabs, stool pigeons, police, sheriff’s deputies, and ultimately the National Guard, employers—whether great industrialists in Detroit and Pittsburgh or little operators of apple orchards—tended to foment the very class feeling, if not the class consciousness, that they deplored.
If some capitalists practiced class conflict without preaching it, some anticapitalists preached the class struggle without practicing it. Forced to pitch their appeals to an enormous range of groups and situations—from Manhattan garment workers to Pittsburgh steelworkers to southern tenant farmers to Texas pecan pickers to California longshoremen—communists and other left radicals adapted their tactics to local possibilities. Even so, they were still banking on the doctrine that in the long run the bleak and needful conditions of existence for millions of workers and farmers would draw them inexorably into class attitudes and class politics.
But how long the long run? Even by their own doctrine, the prologue to class war in America was not being written during the early New Deal. That doctrine assumed not only the objective conditions for lower-class solidarity but a sharpening consciousness of deprivation and need. Such consciousness could not develop spontaneously but required a heightened sense of conflict with social and economic elites. Such a sense of class conflict required in turn, as Lenin had practiced and preached, the kind of transcending and transforming leadership that could lift people out of their parochial day-to-day concerns to a vision of a better future in a new society. Radicals needed to persuade the working class that it had only two alternatives—staying with the “capitalistic-liberal-bourgeois-neofascist coalition presently running America,” as the jargon had it, or joining a radical movement or party dedicated to overthrowing the system and all its evils. There was no choice in between.
American socialists, fundamentally pluralist, rejected this harsh class division. But some citizens endorsed it. During the early New Deal an eighteen-year-old youth on relief wrote a poem called “Prayer of Bitter Men”:
We are the men who ride the swaying freights,
We are the men whom Life has beaten down,
Leaving for Death nought but the final pain
Of degradation. Men who stand in line
An hour for a bowl of watered soup,
Grudgingly given, savagely received.
We are the Ishmaels, outcasts of the earth,
Who shrink before the sordidness of Life
And cringe before the filthiness of Death.
Will there not come a great, a glittering Man,
A radiant leader with a heavier sword
To crush to earth the enemies who crush
Those who seek food and freedom on the roads?
We care not if Thy flag be white or red,
Come, ruthless Savior, messenger of God,
Lenin or Christ, we follow Thy bright sword.
Heightening the class consciousness of the masses, sharpening their sense of conflict with the capitalist elites, providing militant cadres to lead these great efforts—all this lay at the very heart of the Communist strategy in the United States. Under the eyes of Lenin himself, the Communist International in 1920 had proclaimed its aim “to fight by all available means, including armed struggle, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie.” In 1928, four years after Lenin’s death, the Sixth World Congress had called on communists everywhere to smash capitalism, if necessary by force. As always, Communist leaders in the United States danced to the international party tune.
On the eve of the 1930s the Communist party in the United States listed around ten thousand members, many of them in the needle and building trades or jobless, with relatively few in basic industries like steel. The membership included only a scattering of blacks, farmers, and working women. The communist movement was broader than the party. Communist foreign-language newspapers had a readership of perhaps 200,000, though the circulation of the English-language Daily Worker was only a small fraction of this number. Through trade union, “Women’s Work,” Negro, and other apparatuses party members penetrated many other organizations. The movement had hosts of sympathizers, including a sprinkling of the very rich.
The great depression should have been a boon to American communism. At last the mightiest industrial nation of them all appeared to be succumbing to the historical inevitability of boom and bust, working-class misery, and proletarian revolution. Party membership, indeed, almost doubled by the end of 1932. But then it shrank by more than three thousand during the next six months. What was wrong? Despite its much touted and feared internal discipline, the American Communist party was so rent with factionalism that Stalin himself dressed down its leaders in Moscow. Even more, the great mass of American workers, stirred though they might be by specific Communist charges and promises, were cool toward left-wing ideologies in general, communist dogma in particular, and an American Communist party that—as they correctly perceived—was always under the overt or covert control of the Kremlin. But these had long been obstacles for the Communists. How now to sharpen class consciousness under the continuing depression? The answer in the early New Deal years appeared to be to redouble the Communists’ tactic of the “united front from below”—the strategy of co-opting other organizations not by deals with their leaders (the “united front from above”) but by forging links with rank-and-file memberships and involving them in the communist movement. By the beginning of 1935 Communist leader Earl Browder—as aggressive in combat as he was bourgeois in appearance—could claim a mass following of over half a million, though signed-up members numbered around 30,000.
The Communists wooed peace lovers and anti-Nazis with the American League Against War and Fascism, young people with the American Youth Congress, artists and authors with the American Writers’ Congress. But the main target was the working class—factory hands, farm laborers, semiskilled and some skilled workers. Here the vaunted leadership skills of the Communists failed them. In the late 1920s, the party had tried to set up separate “red unions” to draw workers from established ones, but these failed miserably. They were quietly liquidated during 1934 and early 1935, while the leadership lamely called for organizing separately and at the same time infiltrating the merely “reformist” unions, working, for instance, “among the A.F. of L. workers wherever they are organized.” This stratagem failed too, for penetrating and dominating the Federation was like invading and capturing a guerrilla army in a swampland; Communists did eventually manage to establish footholds in key industrial unions.
Determined never to be outflanked on the left, the American Communists could not ignore a competing force on their immediate right—the Socialist party. American socialists could look back to their days of glory— to the vibrant leadership of Eugene Debs, to the stunning election results of 1912, when hundreds of socialists were elected to state legislatures and city councils, to the 885,000 votes Norman Thomas won twenty years later. They could boast of able and experienced leadership, especially that of Thomas himself, the benign visionary and eloquent Presbyterian, product of both Princeton and East Harlem slums. “His humane and appealing version of Socialism,” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted, won “many disciples in the churches and on the campuses: where Debs had Americanized Socialism for the working class, Thomas Americanized it for the middle class.”
But the socialists, like the communists and most other radical movements, were divided, and at a time when a united effort was most needed. Seasoned but defanged older leaders jousted with young “Militants” whose clenched-fist salutes and socialist-left views appeared to some old-timers as smacking of communism. Young, college-educated socialists with middle-class backgrounds wanted to move more vigorously toward more radical goals than did the old guard, with its working-class and immigrant origins. Militants also fought with Militants. Socialist comrades battled over hard questions: how closely should they work with the labor movement, itself divided; should the party preach revolution or evolution, class war or class harmony; should socialists fight the New Deal or invade and reform it; how, specifically, could a radical, egalitarian socialist movement work with a conservative, craft-union-dominated AFL? Thomas, himself more sympathetic to the radical Militant wing, tried to hold the movement together.
As reaction and fascism mobilized in Europe against a divided left, Thomas also tried to make peace with the Communists, but too many hatreds, ancient and current, stood in the way. Early in 1934 New York Socialists and unionists called a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden to protest the murderous suppression of Austrian Social Democrats by the clerical-fascist Dollfuss regime. Determined to take over the meeting from the “social fascists,” hundreds of communists broke into the Garden, drowned out David Dubinsky and other speakers, and tried to take over the podium. The meeting broke up in a melee of fistfights, bottle-throwing, and knifings. He was now convinced, Thomas wrote his fellow civil libertarian and friend Roger Baldwin, “that a united front with Communists is impossible.” But both sides went back to speaking to each other. They had to. In the Archey Road, Finley Peter Dunne’s philosophizing barkeep Mr. Dooley had observed, “when a man and a woman found they simply couldn’t go on living together, they went on livin’ together.” The two movements were bound to each other, if only out of shared political frustration and a common capitalist enemy.
Both groups had failed to provide leadership to the great mass of industrial and farm workers. A new, far more dynamic leadership was already emerging out of the industrial grass roots of the nation. This leadership, bursting through the old confining structures of craft fiefdom and business unionism, moved American labor into the new era of corporate capitalism and shaped the labor movement for decades to come. It was leadership committed to a simple but bold idea—industrial unionism.
The American Federation of Labor embraced industrial unions, such as the Mine Workers, as well as craft unions, but its dominant ideas and institutions were still vintage Gompers—limited political action; ad hoc, day-to-day tactics; fear even of benevolent government; the granting of exclusive territories to the big national unions that comprised the AFL; organization of workers on the basis of occupations and skills rather than whole industries, such as auto or steel. Suddenly, in late 1933 and in 1934, the Federation had a bonanza on its hands—hundreds of thousands of less skilled workers, historically the hardest to awaken but now, in the heady climate of the New Deal, eager to join unions in their plants or industries. How to exploit this bonanza, which the Federation had not earned but which had sprung out of partial recovery, Roosevelt’s inspirational leadership, NRA’s Section 7(a), and heightened hopes and expectations?
The Federation’s answer was to dump the unorganized into “federal unions”—big catchall bodies, weak and short-lived—until these workers could be parceled out to existing unions and their locals. But now, amid the organizing fever of 1934, something was different. Taking on a life of their own, the federal unions generated their own leaders, who began insisting that the AFL authorize them to form broad-based industrial unions. Youthful, defiant, impatient, as Irving Bernstein has described them, those leaders knew that only workers united industry by industry, plant by plant, could prevail against unified corporate elites. They were supported, rather surprisingly, by such publications as Fortune and the Literary Digest, such notables as Walter Lippmann and General Johnson.
But the decision would be made within the AFL, and the Federation was sorely divided. On one side of the issue sat the chiefs of the AFL’s great national craft unions, men like John Frey of the Metal Trades, obsessively protective of his machinists’ craft enclaves; William “Big Bill” Hutcheson, the big, burly, rough-spoken head of the Carpenters; Dan Tobin, the smooth, seasoned boss of the Teamsters. Hutcheson, an active Republican who had supported Hoover in 1932, and Tobin, an ally of Roosevelt’s, personified the vaunted “nonpartisanship” of the Federation. In the dead center of the contestants sat William Green, cautious, deliberate, his rounded face and form seemingly smoothed out by years of conciliation and compromise.
On the left, preaching industrial unionism, were such leaders as George L. Berry, the veteran head of the pressmen, and two men who had emerged out of the tumultuous immigrant world of New York City, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. No one doubted who was their chieftain—John L. Lewis. With his huge miner’s torso, his shaggy eyebrows beneath a shock of hair, his face fixed in an almost perpetual scowl, his deep rumbling voice, he was a formidable figure both to mine owners and to his AFL rivals.
And so the argument raged at numberless council and committee meetings between the November 1934 and October 1935 conventions of the Federation. The craft unionists evoked ancient dogma about labor unity and settled arrangements, raised the bogey of “dual unionism,” and deprecated mass-production workers as fair-weather members who would join the new union for higher wages and then pull out. Lewis & Co. urged that above all the Federation must take in the millions clamoring at its gates and organize them in mighty locals that could challenge General Motors and Ford and U.S. Steel. Neither side was monolithic; Green tried conciliation, and men like Dubinsky sought to restrain Lewis from moving too far ahead of his small group. In this fluid situation there was only one constant: the old guard had the votes.
One short hard punch dramatized the final rupture. Hour after hour delegates to the 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City had debated a minority report in favor of industrial unionism. Finally Lewis took the floor. “The labor movement,” he said, “is organized upon a principle that the strong shall help the weak.” Hence it was morally wrong for craft unions that stood on their own feet “like mighty oaks” not to help weak unions exposed to “the lightning and the gale.” If they rejected the minority report, “high wassail” would prevail at the banquet tables of the mighty. The convention voted it down. Two days later Lewis, trying to revive the issue, ran into Hutcheson’s parliamentary objection. “Small potatoes,” Lewis shouted, and Hutcheson responded in kind. As Lewis moved back to his seat he and Hutcheson had another exchange. Hearing the word “bastard,” Lewis sent Hutcheson to the floor with that one punch. He then straightened his collar and tie, relit his cigar, and sauntered casually to the podium.
“You shouldn’t have done that, John,” said President Green. “He called me a foul name,” said Lewis. “Oh,” said Green, “I didn’t know that.”
Three weeks later Lewis, Hillman, Dubinsky, and others set up a Committee for Industrial Organization, with Lewis as chairman. Despite the group’s promises to work within the Federation, labor was now headed toward civil war, as the craft unionists look an increasingly adamant stand, and pressure from aroused grass-roots leaders pushed Lewis & Co. toward a separate organization. Desperately Green tried to mediate. Not only had he risen through an industrial union, the Miners, but he had written eloquently in favor of industrial unionism as concentrating the strength of skilled and unskilled. Lewis played on this past in a letter to Green:
“Why not return to your father’s house? You will be welcome. If you care to dissociate yourself from your present position, the Committee for Industrial Organization will be happy to make you its Chairman in my stead.” “I am in my father’s house,” Green replied. “It is my firm purpose to remain there.” In more than thirty years in the labor movement, he added pointedly, “I have never aligned myself with any … dual movement.”
Consciously or not, American communists, socialists, and trade unionists were acting in the spirit of the great working-class movements that had emerged during the industrial revolution. Millions of Americans, however, had grown up in another, more middle-class tradition that rivaled working-class ideology in its intellectual and moral power and its social impact. This was the social-reform movement within the three great Western religions, stemming from the emphasis on collective morality, philanthropy, and responsibility in Judaism; from reformism, abolitionism, and the missionary spirit—including missions to the urban poor—in the Protestant churches; from the heightened Roman Catholic concern with social justice.
This last was not least. As the miseries of the factory system became more acute and widespread during the nineteenth century, Catholics had turned back to the teachings of Thomas Aquinas of six hundred years before—especially his definition of a just order that balances social duties with individual rights—and to other thinkers and actors in the Thomist tradition. These ideas came to a dramatic focus in 1891with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum, or On the Condition of the Working Class. While broadly concerned with maintaining an ordered and equitable society under the tutelage of the Church, Leo’s call for social action to relieve poverty was a trumpet blast for hundreds of young priests who every day, in their parishes, confronted the human wreckage left behind by the march of industry.
In the industrial city of Toronto at the end of the century existed an order, the Basilian Fathers, that was deeply stirred by the Catholic movement for social justice. To a school run by this order there came a twelve-year-old boy escorted by his parents, a seamstress and a church sexton. The boy’s mother, it was said, on giving birth had murmured a prayer: “A girl—for the—convent,” or if a boy, “please, God—a priest.” Brought up by these pious parents, the boy did become a priest, after starring at school as scholar and athlete. Before his proud mother in the front pew he celebrated his first mass in the summer of 1916. His name was Charles E. Coughlin.
There seemed nothing remarkable about this young priest as he went about his parish duties during the next few years—except for two things. One was his persuasive, almost enticing voice, warm, resonant, portentous. The other was his willingness to use that newfangled device, the radio. He had hardly settled into his final parish in Royal Oak, twelve miles north of downtown Detroit, when he began building a new church, using up-to-date fund-raising devices, and arranging with a local radio station to offer sermons over the air in order to attract new parishioners. Soon that voice— adorned with a bit of an Irish brogue and charged with such “manly, heart-warming, confidential intimacy, such emotional and ingratiating charm,” in Wallace Stegner’s words, as to be one of the “great speaking voices of the twentieth century”—was attracting listeners by the thousands, then by the tens of thousands, and finally by the millions.
Success did not soon spoil Charles Coughlin—or at least cause him to forget who he was and where he was. He was a priest under the authority of a bishop to whom he gave unceasing and proper obeisance, receiving in turn the protection—against politicians, the public, even others in the hierarchy—that only a bishop could provide. And he was a priest in the Detroit area, a social wilderness even before the depression and an economic wasteland after it struck. Sickened by the poverty and desperation all around him—Detroit had the highest jobless rate of any major city by April 1930—the young priest struck directly at the foundation of the problem: unbridled capitalism. It was not worth saving, he charged; “in fact it is a detriment to civilization.” Often he coupled these attacks with denunciations of communism, socialism, divorce, birth control, Prohibition.
Plenty of people were attacking capitalism by this time; Coughlin stood out for his audacity. He named names: Herbert Hoover, the Rothschilds, the Dillon-Reads, the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”—Morgan, Mellon, Mills, and Meyer. He lambasted such Catholic heroes as Al Smith for “selling out” to Morgan and other capitalists, such Catholic dignitaries as William Cardinal O’Connell for his notorious “silence on social justice.” By 1934 Coughlin was simply a phenomenon, with a steady weekly audience of at least ten million, scores of assistants to handle the million letters that might come in after a major speech, and a magnificent new church of his own next to a 150-foot stone tower in which he had his office.
One man the young priest revered, aside from his bishop—Franklin D. Roosevelt. He had had some contact with the New York governor before and during the 1932 campaign, and had even worked quietly for him at the convention; he could not openly endorse Roosevelt but made up for this with ferocious attacks on Hoover. After the Hundred Days, however, his adulation became public, and almost total. It was “Roosevelt or Ruin.” The New Deal was “Christ’s Deal.” Coughlin wrote fulsome letters to the President, praising FDR as magnificent, fearless, a natural-born artist with the radio. He adjured his followers to support the President, to love him. Even more, he began to insinuate himself into the extended White House. He referred to the President as the “boss”; called staff members by their first names; offered free advice. On their part, friends of the Administration such as Joseph Kennedy and Frank Murphy held Coughlin’s hand to keep him on board.
As Roosevelt’s popularity waxed, so did Coughlin’s. His mail, his audience, his unsolicited donations from listeners rose to new highs. Earlier Coughlin had demonstrated his power when CBS, the radio network over which he spoke, asked him to water down his fiery speeches. CBS retreated after Coughlin indignantly appealed to his listeners. When CBS later refused to renew his contract, the “Radio Priest” simply organized his own network. Thereafter he could overcome complaints from local radio stations by threatening to take his orations—and his audiences—elsewhere. And his audiences were broadening as he reached out beyond the desperately needful people of industrial Michigan to members of the lower-middle and middle-middle classes—to persons who had gained and were clinging to some bourgeois respectability, to skilled craft workers, even to farmers.
By 1934 Coughlin appeared unassailable, for his power lay in his own personal constituency—his audience. For him the power was the medium that linked him to his followers. But his followers had power over him too. His listeners were leading him even while he was leading them. As Coughlin lauded Roosevelt and denounced the “plutocrats,” he aroused his listeners’ hopes and hatreds to fever pitch. Soon the priest began to have policy differences with the President; Coughlin’s central concern was with money and its control, which he wanted shifted from the bankers to the government, while Roosevelt had broader legislative concerns. But the widening gap was both political and psychological; Coughlin was now on a separate trajectory from the President’s, and his deep-seated ideological differences with FDR were bound to mount under electoral pressures.
Late in 1934 Coughlin announced his plan to form a new association, the National Union for Social Justice, as “an articulate, organized lobby of the people.” Thus he would mobilize his audience for action. There would be card files, membership lists, local meetings. But no one doubted the nature of the symbol and the instrument of the new organization. It was the microphone.
The microphone gave another commanding figure a strong grip on the imagination of the American people during the early 1930s. Huey Long was one of the first politicians to use radio, as far back as the mid-1920s, but the power of his visual impact—his rumpled hair, loosened collar, and violent gestures—did not carry through the medium, and his sharp, insistent voice contrasted with Coughlin’s smooth and sonorous delivery. As he reached for a national audience in the early 1930s, however, Long learned to moderate his voice and switch easily back and forth between “Luziana corn pone” for home audiences and a clear and resonant style for the networks. By 1935 his political speeches over NBC were reaching huge audiences, exceeded only by those of Coughlin and Roosevelt.
What Long said, as much as how he said it, was arresting. Although his policy positions shifted somewhat over the years, his central, unvarying pitch was that Roosevelt, Morgan, and the rest had seized control of the nation’s riches. The only solution was his Share Our Wealth plan. He offered “facts and figures.” Two percent of the people owned 60 percent of the wealth, he contended. It was as though all Americans had been invited to a great barbecue. “God called: ‘Come to my feast.’” But the big capitalists “stepped up and took enough for 120,000,000 people and left only enough for 5,000,000 for all the other 125,000,000 to eat. And so many millions must go hungry and without these good things God gave us unless we call on them to put some of it back.”
How put it back? Long proposed that the government confiscate all inheritances of more than $1 million, take in income tax any and all money a person made over $1 million in a year, and heavily tax existing wealth. Then would come the sharing. The government would guarantee every needy family a minimum income of $2000-$3000 a year. Even better, each such family would be granted a basic “household estate” of $5000, “enough for a home, an automobile, a radio,” and other goods. Government would also support stepped-up aid to farmers, pensions for the aged, education for the young, public works, shorter working hours. Long left many of the details vague and the complexities unaddressed, but he promised to call in “some great minds” to help him.
Such proposals created an uproar in the press, even in the New Deal atmosphere. All this was demagogic pandering at its worst, cried conservative editors. Long himself, as H. L. Mencken had perceived earlier, was “simply a backwoods demagogue of the oldest and most familiar model— impudent, blackguardly, and infinitely prehensile.” It was easy for economists to punch holes in his economic program; at the very least, the available money, no matter how drastically squeezed out of the rich, would not have met the human needs he dramatized. Still, however simplistic the plan, it was not “an attempt to divert attention away from real problems; it did not focus resentment on irrelevant scapegoats or phony villains,” Alan Brinkley concluded. “It pointed, instead, to an issue of genuine importance; for the concentration of wealth was, even if not in precisely the form Long described it, a fundamental dilemma of the American economy.” It was also a fundamental moral dilemma of American democracy.
Long expected the uproar, he welcomed it, he thrived on it. He was a child of conflict, born in a state almost schizoid in its division between the Catholic, French Cajun, and mercantile cultures of southern Louisiana and the Protestant, lumber, oil, small-farm cultures upstate, born in the northern poor-white region that had been seared by populist and other challenges to the old white power structure. As a child he had embodied conflict, fighting—though not physically if he could help it—with his brothers and playmates, infuriating his teachers and other elders with his impudent questions, later harshly attacking anyone who stood in the way of his political ambition. His pugnacity and tireless campaigning paid off early. In 1918, at the age of twenty-five, he was elected the youngest member ever of the state’s Railroad Commission. He then spent ten years stumping up and down the state, and in 1928 won the governorship.
He looked the part of the fighter as he castigated his enemies, his rubbery features tightening in righteous wrath, hair streaming down on his face, arms pumping, voice driving and piercing. His tactics as governor provoked his foes to fight back through investigations, the courts, an impeachment effort, appeals to Washington, but with little success. Long’s power stemmed more and more from practical action. Out of his contempt for the old guard, the wide exposure to suffering people he had gained as a door-to-door salesman, and the snubs he was handed by the socially privileged of his adopted city of Shreveport came a lifelong concern for the poor that as governor he converted into tangible results. In a state crying for expanded public services, he and his allies immensely enlarged the Louisiana highway system, built bridges, improved public health services, provided schoolchildren with free textbooks, upgraded the school system in general and Louisiana State University very much in particular.
A “bad Huey” appeared to struggle with a “good Huey”—his ruthless power-seeking versus his concern for people, his challenge to the establishment that included an unconstitutional effort to tax advertising in large newspapers, his attack on privilege that left out solid measures such as child-labor laws, minimum-wage laws, old-age insurance. Still, by the early 1930s the “Kingfish,” as he now liked to be called, had clamped so firm a grip on Louisiana politics that he could agitate on the national stage as a United States senator. This brought him into political collusion and then collision with Roosevelt.
The collusion was strictly practical. When the Roosevelt forces at the 1932 Democratic convention supported the seating of Long’s delegation, the senator worked to keep Louisiana and other southern delegates in line for the New York governor. The two men had never liked each other. Long considered Roosevelt a political dilettante; after Montana senator Burton Wheeler, along with George Norris, had helped bring him around to the governor, Long told Wheeler, “I didn’t like your son of a bitch,” but would support him. Roosevelt, for his part, viewed the Louisiana senator as one more strident voice that could be kept in harmony by judicious combinations of evasion, flattery, and deals. But behind practicalities and personalities lay an ideological conflict that Roosevelt had not yet fully grasped. Long was determined to carry his populist and egalitarian ideas into the national arena, while the President was still engaged in brokerage. Meanwhile, the Kingfish would maintain his grip on his Louisiana base, using his own judicious combination of force, fraud, and favors.
The collision was not long in coming. The Hundred Days electrified the country but turned off Huey Long. He opposed the Economy Act, anti-inflation efforts, the Administration’s rejection of the veterans’ bonus payment, and above all the NRA. On a visit to Roosevelt, the Kingfish played the boor, keeping his straw hat on, or whipping it off to tap the President on the knee or elbow; but he could not puncture FDR’s genial façade. “What the hell is the use of coming down to see this fellow,” he muttered on leaving the White House, “I can’t win any decision over him.” About ready to break away from Long, the Administration cut off patronage and reopened a suspended probe of Louisiana shenanigans. Long compared Hoover to a hoot owl and Roosevelt to a scrootch owl.
“A hoot owl bangs into the roost and knocks the hen clean off, and catches her while she’s falling. But a scrootch owl slips into the roost and scrootches up to the hen and talks softly to her. And the hen just falls in love with him, and the first thing you know, there ain’t no hen. ”
Long would evade the scrootch owl. Early in 1934 he announced over a radio network his plan for a new national organization, the Share Our Wealth Society, with the slogan “Every Man a King.” It would fight for the egalitarian principles the Kingfish had long since proclaimed: heavy taxes on big fortunes and incomes, guaranteed family income, and the rest. Long was now adding a plan for local Share Our Wealth clubs that would blanket the nation. Popular reaction was quick, strong, and sustained. Tens of thousands of letters and applications poured into Long’s offices during the succeeding months—so many that Long had to set up a work force that spilled out of his Senate office into extra rooms and even into the corridors. By the end of 1934 his Share Our Wealth movement boasted of having three million members—though observers then and later differed over the extent to which this was a solid following or a “glorified mailing list.”
By this time Long had established a communications kingdom of his own, embracing his monthly newspaper, American Progress; his autobiography, Every Man a King; a huge mailing and “membership” list; and frequent recourse to the NBC radio network. This last was crucial. Ad-libbing freely, using his voice skillfully, attacking his foes unstintingly, quoting the Bible promiscuously, he built up by 1935 one of NBC’s biggest audiences.
It was clear that the 1936 election campaign would be dominated by three masters of the radio. The age of electronic political communication was already underway.
On the face of it, Roosevelt seemed to be riding high politically as he entered his midterm in January 1935. He and his party had won a convincing victory in the congressional elections two months before. Many of his New Deal programs were solidly in place. The great mass of people still loved him, many to the point of veneration.
The President, in fact, was headed into a time of troubles, and he may have known this, at least intuitively. While European affairs were relatively quiet for the moment, Hitler had consolidated his power and seemed more threatening and truculent than ever. Not to be outdone, Mussolini was threatening war in Ethiopia over territory on the border of Italian Somaliland. The murder of King Alexander of Yugoslavia by a Croatian terrorist in Marseilles had left people with revived memories of the assassination in Sarajevo twenty years earlier, and its dire consequences. In January the President, a supporter of the World Court, was handed a sharp reminder about the limits of his own power over foreign relations when the Senate vote for membership in the World Court failed of the required two-thirds.
But Roosevelt’s main troubles lay at home. Politically he was little daunted by the resurgence of business opposition on the right, because the Liberty League and the rest gave him choice campaign targets. Far more threatening was the mobilization of popular forces behind Long, Coughlin, and the other voices of protest; and probably Roosevelt sensed that the expectations he had aroused in his first two years were rising to new heights and would now sweep back onto the Administration. It is doubtful, though, that the President yet felt intimidated by this prospect; he was an old hand, after all, at operating in the political center against both right and left.
Rather, his main problem during these cold winter weeks was intellectual. This leader who had showed himself such a master of experimentation, improvisation, and tactical maneuver now had to face hard strategic alternatives that embraced policy and program as well as politics. He had still made no final choice between conciliating or at least mollifying business and seriously reforming it, between ordering and rationalizing business in the spirit of the NRA and atomizing or regulating it in the spirit of Louis Brandeis, between balancing the budget and spending heavily to meet acute human needs. Go left or stay in the center? To move right was not an option for the New Deal.
Nor could the President fall back on concerted advice from his staff. Raymond Moley, frustrated by FDR’s improvisations, was drifting back to private life; Tugwell saw the New Deal as incomplete; Berle feared that the Administration was disintegrating. Louis Howe, who had kept his boss close to the great constituencies of need that made up the foundation of the Democratic party, lay dying of emphysema during the early months of 1935; he slipped away in mid-April. Even before Howe’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt felt that her husband was seeing a narrower range of advisers. Molly Dewson, on the firing line at Democratic party headquarters, was concerned about the President’s faltering leadership. To worriers the First Lady gave the President’s response: “Please say to everyone who tells you that the President is not giving leadership” that he was working closely with Congress, “but this is a democracy after all, and if he once started insisting on having his own way immediately, we should shortly find ourselves with a dictatorship.…
“The ups and downs in people’s feelings, particularly on the liberal side, are an old, old story. The liberals always get discouraged when they do not see the measures they are interested in go through immediately.…
“Franklin says for Heaven’s sake, all you Democratic leaders calm down and feel sure of ultimate success. It will do a lot in satisfying other people.”
Western and southern farmers were especially impatient with FDR by 1935. For two years agricultural politics, policy, and administration had epitomized the character of the first New Deal: improvised, experimental, controversial but neither radical nor conservative, basically humane. The Agricultural Adjustment Act had been hammered out during early 1933 amid heavy pressures from farm interests and desperate farmers. These pressures had continued to affect its administration, and the fearsome drought of 1934 had intensified the desperation. Supporters of diverse policies—higher farm prices and inflation in general, the old McNary-Haugen scheme for stimulating farm sales abroad and stabilizing farm prices at home, refinancing of farm debts, raising farm prices by cutting down production—continued to fight for their particular road to agricultural salvation.
Roosevelt’s farm effort embraced elements of these and other policies, but the heart of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration program lay in the Domestic Allotment plan. This meant “plowing every third row under” and slaughtering little pigs (so they would not become big hogs and inflate supply). Nothing could have been more shocking to a world with a half-billion or more hungry people, to a nation that measured progress by productivity, to millions of Americans long undernourished, and to the farmers themselves. In Georgia, a cotton planter carefully marked off twenty-five acres to be plowed up and told several tenants that someday soon he would tell them to go to it. A field investigator overheard the tenants’ murmured conversation.
“You know,” said one, “I ain’t never pulled up no cotton stalks befo’, and somehow I don’t like the idea.”
“I been feelin’ sorter funeral-like all afternoon,” said another. But a third had a happier thought.
“Let’s swap work that day; you plow up mine, and I’ll plow up yours.”
Henry Wallace and his Agriculture Department appeared to face almost insuperable problems. They had to cope with a hundred or so zealots in the farm bloc in Congress who watched their every move. In the Senate they confronted some of the most powerful and prestigious lawmakers, many of them prima donnas. From the old, northern-based Grange on the right to the National Farmers’ Holiday Association on the left they were lobbied by some of the most potent farm and commodity groups in the nation, including the well-entrenched American Farm Bureau Federation and the militant Tenant Farmers’ Union. Processors, railroad and other transportation interests, farm equipment makers, rural banks, and others stood guard over their turfs. These groups were as quick to unite against a minor perceived threat as they were slow to unite behind a program for farmers as a whole.
Bolstered by Roosevelt’s backing and popularity, funds from processing taxes, and inspirited leadership by talented federal administrators, the AAA promulgated its rules, set up its field staffs, issued its millions of checks, and pumped money into the nation’s fiscal bloodstream. Yet the AAA paid a price. To get quick results it often had to make peace with legislators, state officials, county farm agents, with the whole panoply of state and regional interests and institutions. Some states had wanted the AAA to be administered through their own departments of agriculture. In Georgia—the President’s “adopted state”—the right-wing populist governor, Eugene Talmadge, followed policies almost opposite to those of the New Deal.
Like an old wooden plow worn and splintered by rocky soil, the Agriculture Department, and especially the AAA, was itself cleft by the economic and political ground it worked in. Offices and bureaus dependent on client groups jousted with one another. Old department hands fought with young New Deal activists. Interests inside and outside the department competed for funds. Centralizers debated with Brandeisian decentralizers. Quick-action enthusiasts pleaded with due-process literalists. A major result of these internal conflicts was that the AAA did reasonably well the work that everyone wanted—getting money into the hands of “constituents”—but did not have the grass-roots clout to bring about fundamental change.
One of these conflicts seemed relatively unimportant in itself but triggered a major crisis in the department. Virtually all the New Dealers in Agriculture were intent on getting AAA money into the hands of tenant farmers and sharecroppers as well as planters and landlords. But some feared “unnecessarily” provoking local resistance, especially of dominant white groups in the South. The question of whether the 1934-35 cotton contract required the landlord to keep the same tenants or the same number of tenants brought matters to a head. Militant New Dealers feared that the latter interpretation would enable landlords to “hire and fire” tenants at will within their set number. When the AAA’s general counsel, Jerome Frank, interpreted the contract to require the retention of tenants, AAA chief Chester Davis sacked him and several of his associates.
This much-publicized “purge” of February 1935 exposed Roosevelt’s plight at midterm. His farm laws, improvisations, and experiments had opened a hornet’s nest of controversial policies, programs, and personalities that were failing to bring a genuine new deal to hundreds of thousands of tenants, sharecroppers, and farm laborers. Along with the financial and psychological relief he had given millions of people, he had aroused consciousness of the need for change without bringing about fundamental or enduring transformation. Hence he confronted farm groups and constituencies more aroused and hopeful than ever. Poor farmers, however, still lacked the catalytic leadership that could jolt them into effective political action; the question by 1935 was whether they would turn to Franklin Roosevelt or some other leadership between “Lenin and Christ.”
The power of leadership at this point was being demonstrated by a most unlikely man and a most unlikely group of dispossessed—the elderly poor and insecure. Dr. Francis Townsend hardly looked the part of the charismatic leader—he was old and ailing and plain and bespectacled, resembling a bit the farmer in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic”; he had a monotonous speaking voice, he had little money left over from his medical practice, and now he was jobless. The people he mobilized appeared to be about the least combustible in the nation: elderly, largely nonpolitical, living on farms or in small towns or cities, heavily Protestant, retired on small incomes if any. Hardly materials for a political explosion, certainly, and yet Townsend and his elderly followers became a political phenomenon during Roosevelt’s first term. The Townsend cause enrolled at least two million people in some seven thousand clubs across the nation. Reporters groped to understand the movement, but they had only to look at its causes.
Dr. Townsend was addressing a dire need—not only the financial poverty of so many of the elderly but their social and psychological predicament. Part of the human price of industrialization and urbanization, many of these men and women had lost their homes and their savings, or barely held on to them; they had left their children back on the old farm, or lost their jobs through a swift-changing technology. They had become isolated, in Talcott Parsons’s view, from “kinship, occupational, and community ties” and hence were ripe for political agitation. They needed help, and Dr. Townsend had a plan, a most wonderful plan: give everyone over sixty federal pensions of $200 a month, with the delectable requirement that the money be spent within the month and thereby bolster the whole economy. A federal sales tax would pay for the scheme. It seemed like the economic equivalent of perpetual motion.
Then there was the doctor himself, who proved to be a master of hype. He liked to tell how he had looked out of his bathroom window one day in Long Beach, California, to see three haggard old women rummaging through garbage cans, how he had burst out into a string of epithets that he wanted God Himself to hear, how he said he would shout “until the whole country hears,” and invented the movement on the spot. In fact, it was no sudden revelation. Townsend himself had come to the end of a long road—born in a log cabin in northern Illinois, he had led something of a Horatio Alger life without the Algerian reward. After picking up jobs as ranch hand, farm laborer, mine-mucker, and teacher in the West, he worked his way through medical college and then endured a hard life as a country doctor in South Dakota. Later, as a medical officer treating the Long Beach indigent during the depression, he had ample reason and time to ponder the plight of the elderly and to concoct his plan.
Not especially religious himself, Townsend invested his venture with a powerful evangelical appeal. He proclaimed that his movement would have as mighty an impact as Christianity. At their club meetings Townsendites sang hymns (including a “new” one, “Onward, Townsend soldiers / Marching as to war”), idolized the doctor as a Christ-like, God-given leader, and discussed how best to budget and spend the anticipated $200. Townsend and his top organizers installed ministers as key regional and state directors. Yet he kept the movement centralized, and he adroitly made it seem safe and respectable, as well as transformative, by such devices as labeling his proposed sales tax a “transaction tax.”
By January 1935 the Townsend movement towered on the political horizon. The Townsend leadership was not above inflating the number of its clubs and members, and a credulous press often exaggerated the Townsendites’ strength; Time overstated the number of clubs by at least fivefold. Stanley High, a minister and friend of the Administration, wrote in to the White House that the more he saw of the movement, the more its power impressed him. “It is doing for a certain class of people what—a few years ago—was done by the prohibition movement: giving them a sublimation outlet.” And had not the drys actually altered the Constitution of the United States?
In what had long ago been part of the “old Northwest”—Wisconsin, Minnesota, and neighboring areas—other storm clouds were rising, where the hopes and expectations of progressives in all their colorations, independent, liberal, radical, socialistic, had glowed anew with the coming of the New Deal. In Wisconsin, “Fighting Bob” La Follette’s dissimilar sons—the cool, thoughtful “young Senator Bob” and the often tempestuous and passionate “Governor Phil”—were united in carrying on their father’s radical mission. They had also carried on the progressive tradition of political independence when, in 1934, they trounced both major parties at the Wisconsin polls. Roosevelt at a press conference had opportunistically expressed a preference for Bob La Follette over possible Democratic candidates for senator. What now would be the relationship between the rejuvenated Progressive party of Wisconsin and the New Deal? There was talk of party realignment—but of which party, in what direction? Much would turn on the future direction of FDR’s currently faltering New Deal.
The La Follettes worked closely with Minnesota governor Floyd Olson, an even more radical leader. While Phil talked vaguely of a cooperative, nonsocialistic society, Olson on the hustings denounced liberalism, fascism, capitalism, communism with equal gusto. What was he for? As governor he had called for public power, insurance for the jobless, a state income tax, and of course mortgage relief. For the nation he preached the gospel of “collective ownership of the means of production and distribution,” though he was no Marxist. If his proposals were somewhat fuzzy, the political power he wielded as head of his militant, well-organized Farmer-Labor party was clear and commanding. Olson too talked about a third party for 1936, headed perhaps by Bob La Follette. What about 1940? he was asked. Said Olson: “Maybe by then I won’t be radical enough.”
It was from the Far West, however, and especially California, that Roosevelt and the nation learned how tumultuous, arousing, colorful, and nutty the politics of protest could be. No one could remember a political leader like Upton Sinclair, winner of the Golden State’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1934. A talkative, ebullient man then in his mid-fifties, Upton Sinclair had never stopped writing, protesting, and politicking since the kindling days of The Jungle and The Brass Check, his famous muckraking works. Indignant over the idle land, factories, and people he saw all about him in the early thirties, he concocted a plan that, he proclaimed categorically, would end poverty in California. And it was called just that: End Poverty in California. Under his plan the state would acquire farmland and factories, turn them over to the jobless to grow food and make their own clothes and furniture and shoes, and issue scrip that could be used for the exchange of produce and goods. Always the Utopian, Sinclair dreamed of the establishment ultimately of networks of workers’ and farmers’ villages. It would be the Cooperative Commonwealth.
The killing of Upton Sinclair’s dream was testament to the novelist’s long avowal of unpopular causes, the ingenuity of California’s power elites, and the Machiavellianism of Franklin Roosevelt.
Like other communitarian plans that had been advanced in America for over a century, EPIC was no real threat to corporate property or profit; nevertheless, the business interests of California—backed up by Republican party leaders, Hollywood moguls and movie stars, and a new type of hatchet job by professional public relations experts—portrayed the one-time muckraker as an atheistic, anarchist communist and a believer in free love, telepathy, and vegetarianism to boot. Fake photographs and newsreels showed California being invaded by bums and tramps seeking an end to their own poverty at the expense of the state’s taxpayers. All this worked in the mercurial, personality-dominated political environment of the Golden State.
Sinclair had fairly beaten the old Wilsonian politico George Creel in the Democratic primary, but the usual White House endorsement of a Democratic candidate was not forthcoming. He appealed to Roosevelt and had no answer. He appealed to Eleanor Roosevelt, who ordinarily supported the EPIC type of local initiative. Instructed by her husband to “(1) Say nothing and (2) Do nothing,” she wrote Sinclair a guarded reply. But FDR was not content to do nothing. He allowed Administration operatives to make a deal with the conservative Republican candidate, Frank Merriam, under which Merriam would proclaim, if he won, that his victory could not have happened without Democratic support and hence was no repudiation of the New Deal. And that was how the Democratic candidate was ditched, to the benefit of a Republican candidate who had come out for “Roosevelt’s policies,” the Townsend plan, and funny-money schemes.
Upton Sinclair the writer had the last word. Having authored I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty before his campaign, he now produced I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, in which he told all. Soon he would be writing his Lanny Budd novels, which apotheosize FDR, the man who had deserted him.
In the half-century since the fateful year of 1935, historians of the New Deal have puzzled over Roosevelt’s alleged “turn to the left.” Did he indeed turn to the left—and what was the “left” to which he turned? Was it from the centrist, bipartisan essence of the “First” New Deal to the radical, populist thrust of the “Second”? Was it from government as regulator and atomizer of concentrated economic power to government as planner and coordinator of it? Was it from government as broker and unifier of major interests to government as a vehicle for more social justice and equality? Was the “Second” New Deal, in short, fundamentally more radical than the “First”? And if it was, why did FDR shift, and at the time that he did—the summer of 1935? Was it a result mainly of external forces, political and economic, working on him, or of intellectual and psychological influences working within him, or of some baffling combination of the two?
Surely a shift to the left seemed logical politically. The Democratic gains in the 1934 midterm elections had confirmed the popularity of FDR and his program. The 1934 ferment in farm and factory, the increasingly strident and persuasive voices of Long, Coughlin, and the others, the pressures from New Deal Democrats and liberal Republicans in Congress—all these appeared to set the stage for a White House call for action as the new year opened and a new Congress got underway. But that was not how the President behaved. He was obviously cool to a measure that would have seemed ideal for both policy and political reasons—New York Senator Robert Wagner’s bill to guarantee labor’s right to organize. His January State of the Union message, moderate in tone and policy recommendation, was hardly a foretaste of the stormy days to come, calling as it did for a “genuine period of good feeling, sustained by a sense of purposeful progress.”
One piece in the puzzle is clear. The President’s dismay over the defeat of the World Court and his intellectual uncertainty did not quickly pass, in contrast to earlier periods when he had been briefly down in the dumps. Activists who saw the President during the spring of 1935 remarked on his passivity and touchiness, almost as though he were suffering from a physical ailment. “I must say that the President seemed to me to be distinctly dispirited,” Ickes noted in his diary late in February. “… He looked tired and he seemed to lack fighting vigor or the buoyancy that has always characterized him.” Ickes doubted that he could put through even his moderate program.
Was Roosevelt at last stopped, immobilized? Instead of preparing to make a mighty strategic choice between programs, between left and center, between ideologies and strategies, at this point he was picking his way, step by step, amid great pressures, moving a bit right or left as he faced specific problems. This was Roosevelt the fox, not the lion. Balancing and brokering from day to day, he was both capable of dealing with events and vulnerable to them. And then, in the spring of 1935, there occurred a series of acts that altered the political climate. These were actions, not of Roosevelt himself or his friends, but of his adversaries.
At the end of April the United States Chamber of Commerce held its annual conference in Washington. Gone and apparently forgotten were the days when the Chamber, speaking for a cowering business community, had endorsed much of the New Deal and even given the President a rising ovation. Now the nation’s business leaders—especially small businessmen who felt distanced from Washington—were ready to counterattack the New Deal. A delegate accused the Administration of trying to “Sovietize the country.” The Chamber voted its opposition to much of the New Deal already in place. Thomas J. Watson privately apologized to the President for such unrestrained criticism, and Winthrop Aldrich of the Chase National Bank, Walter Gifford of American Telephone and Telegraph, Myron Taylor of U.S. Steel, and a few other “industrial statesmen” who were now less anti-New Deal than most smaller entrepreneurs paid a placatory visit to the White House, but the President had heard the message from the wards and precincts of conservatism.
Most of FDR’s business foes could only protest, but there were other conservatives—conservatives with teeth. These were five men who made up a majority on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. Aside from one Wilson appointment, they were the legatees of Republican Presidents who had chosen safe and dependable men from the world where business, the bar, and politics converged. The minority of four were also legatees of one Democratic and several Republican Presidents—Chief Justice Hughes, appointed by Hoover; Brandeis (Wilson); Harlan F. Stone (Coolidge); and Benjamin N. Cardozo (Hoover).
No President can be sure that his judicial appointees fully share his political philosophy or will continue to share it. There was no compact old guard majority on the Court arrayed against a solid minority expressing the views of Wilsonian democracy and liberal Republicanism. Majorities and minorities recombined fluidly as individual cases were heard. But the ideology of the 1920s—indeed, of the nineteenth century—hung closely enough over the Court as to produce a virtual massacre of New Deal measures between January 1935 and the spring of 1936. Stricken down successively were the “hot oil” provisions of the NRA Act, the Railroad Pension Act, the NRA itself, the farm mortgage law, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Guffey Bituminous Coal Act, and the Municipal Bankruptcy Act.
One act that escaped the judicial guillotine caused Roosevelt as much worry as several that died under it. In January 1935 the High Court began hearing arguments on the power of the government to impair the obligation of contracts, public and private, a power Congress had claimed during the Hundred Days in nullifying the gold clauses in such contracts. A decision affirming the sanctity of contracts would put in jeopardy the power of Congress to control monetary policy and would bring dire practical consequences. The public debt would immediately jump by $10 billion, while the total debt—which FDR was still vainly hoping to reduce—would soar to almost $70 billion. Bondholders, demanding full gold value for their bonds of $1.69 for every dollar, would reap a bonanza.
Apprehensively, Roosevelt, Morgenthau, and their aides waited in the White House for the Court’s verdict to come over the ticker. Then the good news: by a 5-4 vote the justices upheld the government. Undoubtedly the President’s relief was deeply tinged with bitterness. For one thing, Chief Justice Hughes, in a tortured ruling for the Court, held that government bonds, in contrast to private obligations, were contractual obligations that Congress had unconstitutionally violated, but that the plaintiff had suffered only nominal damage and could not sue in the Court of Claims. More than ever the President must have reflected about the ungrateful capitalist and the lost top hat. His gold policy had been designed to stabilize the financial markets, to shore up capitalism—was this the response of the business community? Justice James C. McReynolds from the bench had accused the government of confiscation, repudiation, destroying the Constitution; and in court, during a twenty-minute extemporaneous harangue, he said, “This is Nero at his worst.”
If any case had been designed to stir Roosevelt’s deepest feelings against a certain type of capitalist—bondholders, coupon-clippers, the idle rich—it was the Gold Clause cases. Even in the eminence of the presidency he could recall the kind of men who, as youths, had excluded him from the inner circles of Groton and Harvard, the men who later had fought both his presidential heroes, TR and Wilson. Certainly as a power broker he could now see the judicial handwriting on the Supreme Court façade. “I shudder at the closeness of five to four decisions in these important matters,” he wrote. Hence he was not surprised by the Supreme Court decision against the NRA on May 27, though he could hardly have expected the unanimous thumbs-down. But once again his class had betrayed him— was not the NRA, even with its dire problems, his best effort to harmonize and stabilize industry and business, to find a middle way between collectivism and unbridled competition?
The right-wing counterattack on the New Deal—through the Supreme Court, small business spokesmen, and a thousand lesser channels—served as a catalytic factor in the forces now pushing the President out of his drift and indecision. By now the President was feeling heavy pressure from the left as well. In mid-May, a week after the Court invalidated the Railroad Pension Act and appeared to question whether old-age pensions lay within the scope of federal commerce power in the Constitution, a group of liberal senators met with Roosevelt for a long talk. La Follette, Johnson, Norris, Wheeler, and Costigan, all of whom had been members of the National Progressive League for Roosevelt in 1932, were there, along with cabinet members Ickes and Wallace, and Felix Frankfurter, who had organized the meeting.
La Follette in particular was brutally frank: The President must reassert leadership. It was well that business spokesmen had attacked him, for now business had put its cards on the table. The best answer to Long and Coughlin was to press ahead on the legislative program. In the light of opposition within the Democratic party, La Follette reminded the President that Theodore Roosevelt had not hesitated to take open issue with members of his own party. FDR might have to do the same thing. Frankfurter brought a warning from Brandeis that it was the “eleventh hour.” The President seemed to be in a fighting mood when the group left.
He was still in a fighting mood at the end of May after the Court’s voiding of the NRA. To his press conference he delivered a one-and-a-half-hour monologue on the substance of the decision. First he quoted a series of poignant letters from small businessmen—a cigar maker, store owner, printer, “drug-store people”—asking in effect, the President said, “please save us.” Smiling, speaking calmly and simply, pausing only to stab out a cigarette and fix a new one in his long ivory holder, Roosevelt dwelt on how the Framers had written the interstate commerce clause into the Constitution back in the “horse-and-buggy” age, how impossible it had become for forty-eight states to deal with nationwide economic needs, and how “we have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce.” Thus did the President of the United States put in his dissenting opinion to a holding of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Where next for the nation, asked the President—toward federal or toward state power over national economic and social problems? “Don’t call it right or left; that is just first-year high-school language, just about. It is not right or left—it is a question for national decision.”
What “national decision” for Roosevelt? Whatever his dislike of the cloudy terms, he was now tilted toward the cloudy liberal-labor-left. But would he go with the Moley-Tugwell-Berle strategy of coordinated national planning and control or with the strategy of decentralized administration, small institutions, and local initiatives urged by Frankfurter, Ben Cohen, and Tommy Corcoran?
The first gun in this struggle had already been fired. On what the New Dealers were already calling “Black Monday”—the day the High Court killed the NRA—Corcoran had started to leave the chamber after the session when a page tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to come to the robing room. There Corcoran found Brandeis holding his arms up to be derobed, looking “for a moment like a black-winged angel of destruction.” The justice spoke sharply to his young friend:
“This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the President that we’re not going to let this government centralize everything. It’s come to an end. As for your young men, you call them together and tell them to get out of Washington—tell them to go home, back to the states. That is where they must do their work.” Corcoran duly got word to the President—but “Tommy the Cork,” as FDR called him, and many of his young colleagues never left Washington.
A message from Brandeis, direct or indirect, was never taken lightly in the Roosevelt While House. For years the justice had been bombarding the Administration with advice, sometimes directly to Roosevelt, usually indirectly through Frankfurter or other mutual friends. The Administration viewed the justice not merely as an adviser, or even as a justice, but as “Isaiah,” a prophet of profound wisdom. He and Frankfurter, moreover, had served virtually as a New Deal scouting and recruiting agency, peopling not only the White House but the whole Administration with talented activists. Always implicit but unspoken in Brandeis’s counsel was the fact that the justice not only could give advice—he could enforce it from the high bench. Now that threat had been made explicit.
By now Roosevelt was asserting leadership, and clearly toward the left, but he still faced a choice, among others, between the “Brandeisian” left and the “Tugwellian” left. Even though his friends and advisers, most of whom were hostile to bigness, redoubled their efforts after NRA’s invalidation, the President still hankered for the kind of “collectivist” control over business that had been embodied in the NRA. But any White House insiders who expected a grand strategic decision from their boss did not know their man. He was not wont to choose between lofty philosophical principles. Rather he would exploit immediate opportunities by modernizing old ideas, applying the results of his own experiments, choosing eclectically among disparate policies, and responding to the pressures of interest groups, especially the rising power of industrial labor. He would find decision in day-to-day action, by throwing himself into new legislative battles.
Late in May began the “Second Hundred Days.” Reverting to his old role of Chief Legislator, the President bluntly told congressional chieftains that certain bills must be passed. Congress, which had been dawdling, was suddenly spurred into action, with the progressives in each chamber now riding high. Laboring in the heat, without air conditioning, Congress responded to the presidential spur.
July 5, 1935—Having given the green light earlier to Senator Robert Wagner, the President signs Wagner’s National Labor Relations Act—the augmented legacy of NRA’s Section 7(a)—and declares that the high goal of the act is a better relationship between labor and management by “assuring the employees the right of collective bargaining” and providing “an orderly procedure for determining who is entitled to represent the employees.” A five-person independent quasi-judicial body will administer the act.
August 14—FDR signs the Social Security Act. “Today a hope of many years’ standing is in large part fulfilled,” he says. After the “startling industrial changes” that in the past century have threatened the security of person and family, “this social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty million of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.”
August 24—The President signs the Banking Act of 1935, which centers control of the money market in the Federal Reserve. This was largely the brainchild of Marriner Eccles at the Federal Reserve Board. The President had predicted to Eccles that “it will be a knock-down and drag-out fight to get it through,” and he was right. Not only leading bankers but old Senator Glass, father of the Federal Reserve System in Wilson days, fought tenaciously against “political control” and won some modifying changes. After the President, at the signing, handed one of the pens to Glass, someone whispered, “He should have given him an eraser instead.”
August 26—Roosevelt signs the Public Utility Holding Company Act. This measure, designed to curb the power of gigantic utility holding companies over their operating subsidiaries, had been urged by the President in January; when he renewed pressure for the bill, the utilities fought back with an intensive propaganda and lobbying campaign. They feared especially FDR’s demand for a “death sentence,” as it came to be called, for utility holding companies that could not show they served a sound economic purpose. Senator Wheeler and Congressman Sam Rayburn had carried the fight in Congress, and Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky pushed through the final compromise version. This allowed a holding company to control more than one public utility system if potential additional systems could otherwise not survive economically. The utility chieftains—especially an unusually articulate spokesman named Wendell Willkie—remained utterly hostile to the measure.
August 31—The President signs the Revenue Act of 1935. In mid-May he had shocked the business community with a message to Congress contending that “great accumulations of wealth cannot be justified on the basis of personal and family security” and calling for taxes on “inherited economic power.” Congress, after a sharp struggle in the country and on the Hill, enacted a measure increasing rates for estate and gift taxes, boosted the surtax rates for large incomes, imposed a graduated rate on corporation income, and placed a special tax on corporations’ undistributed earnings.
These bills—the Big Five—were the essence of the Second Hundred Days. But the momentum of that year initiated or invigorated many other elements of the New Deal: rural electrification, youth programs, protection of natural resources, farm credit, above all the WPA and other spending programs for the needy—covering almost the whole of Roosevelt’s concerns and amounting in effect to the Second New Deal. Probably the most important of these programs—certainly the most important in its direct impact on people’s lives—was Harry Hopkins’s Works Progress Administration, designed to replace the faltering federal-state-local direct relief efforts with a big national works program for jobless employables. Even while Congress passed the Second Hundred Days laws, Hopkins was gearing up his agency to spend the $5 billion appropriated for the first year. Within that year WPA rolls numbered almost 3.5 million people. Hopkins’s was the most visible and controversial New Deal program; gangs of WPA workers repairing roads or bridges were often jeered at by passersby still lucky enough to have jobs and cars.
Studying Roosevelt’s 1935 measures and actions, observers were still uncertain whether the President was at last opting for the Brandeis-Frankfurter anti-bigness stance. Was he moving strongly in a progressive, even radical direction toward economic equality and social justice?
The Brandeis school feared bigness both in business and in government—but to what extent was a strong and unified federal government needed to curb private concentrated power? Could decentralized governmental power compel diffused economic power? It seemed unlikely. Yet the progressive senators were hardly in a mood to substitute big public bureaucracies for big private ones, except for such huge programs as AAA and Social Security that clearly demanded massive government. The holding company bill, administered by a relatively small regulatory agency like the SEC, was a model for the decentralizers.
A big federal program or bureau, on the other hand, did not necessarily mean monolithic and centralized power. The NRA had provided for code-making by private interests as well as by Hugh Johnson’s diktats. The AAA provided for farmers’ referendums. The Tennessee Valley Authority embraced extensive local decision making as well as regional. The 1935 “wealth tax” was in part an assault on big business. The decentralizers’ rhetoric rarely took into account such subtleties or ambivalences. Senator Wheeler, according to Ronald Mulder, believed that a proper use of governmental power could decentralize both the economy and the government. “Excessive centralization in whatever form it may exist negated American ideals,” Wheeler said. The Brandeis school may have won some symbolic victories in the Second Hundred Days, but the balance between bigness and smallness, between central and local control, did not fundamentally change.
Equality? The fierce reaction of Liberty Leaguers and other conservatives—including judges—to the “radicalism” and “Bolshevism” of the Second New Deal left FDR with a more liberal image than ever. To a considerable degree this was deserved. But the measures of the Second Hundred Days did not constitute a major shift toward economic equality and social justice. Because the President had an insurance model in mind for Social Security, this vital program was financed by payroll taxes that were as regressive as sales taxes. The payroll tax, according to Mark Leff, reaped as much each month in federal revenue as the controversial income tax increase under the 1935 wealth tax did in a whole year. In short, the Social Security Act sought social security, not income redistribution— though in the long run the first was hardly possible without the latter. Many of the other key 1935 bills, as well as lesser ones, had been watered down by congressional and business opposition.
The acid test for Roosevelt’s liberalism—and that of all Presidents—was tax policy. Here again the President was left with a sharpened progressive image, and deservedly so, for his original bill had strong redistributionist elements. Yet these were much weakened in the legislative labyrinth. On close analysis, indeed, the Second New Deal appeared a creature less of ideological or policy consistency than of legislative and electoral necessity. Roosevelt had made no philosophically based or motivated grand strategic deployment to the left. He was more like the commander of a guerrilla army whose scattered columns, fighting blindly in the mountains through dense ravines and thickets, suddenly converge, half by plan and half by coincidence, and debouch into the plain below.
And if the Politician-in-Chief should ever forget the centrality of politics, there were those who would remind him. In particular there was one boisterous, pudgy-faced senator who by early 1935 was in open revolt against the White House. Huey Long attacked the Social Security bill for the payroll tax, the stinginess of its pensions for the aged, and other inadequacies. But the Kingfish’s great moment came when FDR’s tax message was read to the Senate. As the President’s specific proposals were spelled out, Huey pranced around the chamber grinning broadly, rolling his eyes in mock amazement, pointing to himself, and letting it be known that the President was stealing his thunder.
A few days later, the Kingfish was at it again. He was glad that the President had joined him at last, he proclaimed. He had some questions for FDR, he said, and if the President answered them satisfactorily, he—the Kingfish—would retire from politics, his work done. Delightedly he quoted Will Rogers’s comment:
“I would sure liked to have seen Huey’s face when he was woke up in the middle of the night by the President, who said, ‘Lay over, Huey, I want to get in bed with you.’”
“We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed. The very nature of the problem that we faced made it necessary to drive some people from power and strictly to regulate others.” The “unscrupulous money-changers” stood indicted in the court of public opinion. They had admitted their failure and abdicated. “Abdicated! Yes, in 1933, but now with the passing of danger they forget their damaging admissions and withdraw their abdication.”
It was the evening of January 3, 1936. From the rostrum of the House of Representatives, Franklin D. Roosevelt looked out at the crowded and boisterous chamber. This was his annual message on the state of the union, and it had started out as a state paper, as he described the growing world crisis. In October, Mussolini’s forces had invaded Ethiopia, and two months later France and Britain had agreed to the conquest of Haile Selassie’s hapless country. “Nations seeking expansion, seeking the rectification of injustices springing from former wars, or seeking outlets for trade, for population or even for their own peaceful contributions to the progress of civilization, fail to demonstrate that patience necessary to attain reasonable and legitimate objectives by peaceful negotiation or by an appeal to the finer instincts of world justice.” But the President hurried on to what was obviously a campaign speech. Indeed, he had insisted on departing from precedent and speaking in the evening in order to reach millions of radio listeners in their homes.
“The rulers of the exchanges of mankind’s goods” now “seek the restoration of their selfish power. They offer to lead us back round the same old corner into the same old dreary street.” Lowering his voice confidentially, rocking back and forth behind the rostrum, FDR was drawing blood. Cheers and rebel yells burst from the Democrats, while the little band of Republicans looked on in bitter silence.
“They steal the livery of great national constitutional ideals to serve discredited special interests.” They would “gang up” against the people’s liberties. They would extend to government the principles many of them had instilled into their own affairs: “autocracy toward labor, toward stockholders, toward consumers, toward public sentiment.” Any doubt that this was the campaign kickoff for 1936 evaporated when the President concluded by anticipating “a balance of the national budget” and seeing no need for new taxes.
But where were the battle lines? Like the Napoleonic general of the armies who surveys the terrain, sizes up the enemy, mobilizes and measures his own troops, and makes sense of it all, the President by attacking early sought to control the theater of combat. As he reconnoitered the political terrain, however, with his sharp eye for divisions on both sides he could see little but factionalism and confusion. The ideological left was divided as usual between communists and socialists, and both these movements were deeply cleft between moderate and militant elements. Father Coughlin was reorganizing his National Union for Social Justice while keeping some distance from rival organizations. The AFL and the new CIO were still busy at fratricide. Dr. Townsend had become increasingly hostile to FDR and was considering a third-party effort. As for the President’s own party, Al Smith and the rest of the old guard were attacking the President at every opportunity and were now aided and abetted by young ideologues of fiscal orthodoxy such as Dean Acheson and Lewis Douglas and by a host of conservative Southerners.
One figure no longer dominated the politics of protest. Two months after his waggish response to FDR’s tax bill on the Senate floor, Huey Long had conducted a final one-man filibuster in the upper chamber and returned home. He was flirting with the notion of seeking to deny Roosevelt a second term by uniting the followers of Townsend, Coughlin, Sinclair, and others against him, thus electing a Republican, who would make such a mess of things that a true believer in sharing the wealth—and who else but the Kingfish himself?—would win the presidency in 1940. And the results of a poll commissioned in spring 1935 by the Democratic National Committee indicated that this was no idle threat. As a third-party candidate, Long might receive three to four million votes, enough, James Farley feared, to give him “the balance of power in the 1936 election.”
Early in September in the Louisiana state capitol, after sauntering around the House chamber telling jokes and barking out orders, Long had swept into one of the marble corridors, followed by his bodyguards. A slight bespectacled man stepped out from behind a pillar, brushed through the guards, and shot one bullet into Huey Long’s stomach. The guards then shot down the assailant and poured bullets into his prone body. He was a young and brilliant Baton Rouge physician who hated Long and his dictatorship and was ready to die in an act of tyrannicide.
After a bungled operation the Kingfish died a day and a half later, murmuring, it was said, “God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.” Quickly a Long lieutenant, Gerald L. K. Smith, stepped forth to convert the third-party movement into his personal political base. Driven out of Louisiana politics by the inheritors of Long’s organization, Smith by early 1936 was seeking to build a nationwide coalition against the President.
Roosevelt was now building his own electoral coalition—far broader than the Democratic party. Indeed, there already existed a coalition of groups that New Deal laws and money had aided. The President had called the roll in his address to Congress—farmers reaping higher prices, homeowners enjoying lower interest rates, workers now able to join in unions of their own choosing, the aged cherishing the prospect of pensions, young people in the CCC, the jobless, investors now protected against speculators. Roosevelt already was instructing Farley and his own political aides to establish campaign organizations that would make direct appeals to such groups.
To the President’s critics this was special-interest politics of the most sordid type. Perhaps they were unduly concerned. The critical presidential reelection campaigns in American history had turned not merely on group allegiances but on presidential qualities that far transcended narrow interest—qualities of trust, commitment, leadership, vision—as well as on widely felt popular benefit and improvement. Although Roosevelt’s popularity as measured by polls had dropped, he still ranked high in public esteem. And he appeared to be fulfilling the supreme promise he had made in 1932—recovery. Unemployment was down by more than one-third from its height of at least 13 million and national income had increased almost two-thirds from the $40 billion level of 1933.
Yet the half-filled glass was also half empty. There were still over 9 million jobless in early 1936. Reemployment during the first term was a result less of careful planning than of direct spending to meet human needs, especially following the big work-relief and public works programs of 1935. Huge sections of the population, moreover, were beyond even the long reach of the New Deal. Millions of poor people on the land—tenants, sharecroppers, farm laborers, migrant workers—had hardly felt the impact of New Deal agricultural programs. Nor had millions of southern blacks, imprisoned in local racist cultures and discriminatory state economic and political structures, and the last to reap benefits from the New Deal because reactionary lawmakers in Washington stood guard over white privilege back home.
Nor had millions of women. Although the New Deal brought unprecedented numbers of women into the government bureaucracy, working women continued to face oppressive job and wage discrimination, and, in a tight labor market, they had little leverage and few options. Married women in particular suffered from the popular notion that unemployment could be reduced by simply denying them jobs. And women were practically excluded from the heavy construction projects at the core of the relief efforts of the PWA and other agencies.
The plight of poor farmers, blacks, and women, however, hardly seemed to preoccupy Roosevelt’s conservative opposition. The President’s heightened militancy quickly aroused an oratorical counteroffensive. Triumphantly the Liberty League presented Al Smith in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel to a great throng that numbered Du Ponts, disaffected Democrats such as Raskob and Davis, and two thousand others. Decked out in white tie and tails, Al had never been more sulphurous. “It’s all right with me if they want to disguise themselves as Norman Thomas, or Karl Marx, or Lenin, or any of the rest of that bunch,” he shouted, “but what I won’t stand for is allowing them to march under the banner of Jefferson, Jackson, or Cleveland.” There could be only one capital, he warned, Washington or Moscow—“the clear, pure, fresh air of free America, or the foul breath of Communistic Russia.” He warned further that come election day he might take a walk—and he did so.
If the key issue against the New Deal was to be its alleged secret Red sympathies, the leader of the opposition must be William Randolph Hearst. In the happy days of 1932, the publisher had helped tilt the nomination toward FDR. Now his papers addressed the President as “you and your fellow Communists” and ran little ditties like:
A Red New Deal with a Soviet Seal
Endorsed by a Moscow hand,
The strange result of an alien cult
In a liberty-loving land.
Almost comical was Hearst’s détente with Smith, whom he had once excoriated. But for Roosevelt the message was clear: with the great bulk of the press against him, he must rely all the more on radio.
FDR’s most menacing foes were still the conservatives with teeth—the conservative majority on the Supreme Court and the federal judges across the land who were tying up Administration programs with injunctions, occasionally adorned with anti-New Deal stump speeches from the bench. When in early 1936 the High Court had struck down the Agricultural Adjustment Act by a 6-3 vote—on the ground that the processing tax was not a genuine tax but a vehicle for regulating agriculture—Stone, dissenting, had called the decision a tortured construction of the Constitution and warned that the judiciary was “not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have the capacity to govern.” His brethren little heeded his admonition, as the beheading of other New Deal measures followed. Then came the most lethal decision of all, a voiding of a New York measure setting a minimum wage for women. The High Court was now thwarting state power as well as national.
“There is grim irony,” Stone wrote in his dissent, “in speaking of the freedom of contract of those who, because of their economic necessities, give their service for less than is needful to keep body and soul together.” As for Roosevelt, he was no longer offering dissenting opinions. Indeed, he was curiously mute. Like the Tar Baby, he “ain’t sayin’ nothin’.”
By late spring both parties were mobilizing for battle. From the start Generalissimo Roosevelt directed operations from his own command post, bypassing Farley as needed. He dealt directly with Lewis and other labor leaders. He mollified businessmen by giving a long White House luncheon for business friends of Commerce Secretary Daniel C. Roper. He set up a new “nonpartisan” organization, with the imposing title of the Good Neighbor League, to appeal to religious, black, civic, and related groups across the nation. Above all he sought to attract support from women. With his backing Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and Molly Dewson organized election cadres of women across the nation. Once again the First Lady demonstrated her capacity to shift almost overnight from her posture of gracious serenity to that of a hardheaded machine politician—who nonetheless viewed campaigns as essentially vehicles for educating the public.
But Roosevelt would hold the spotlight. “There’s one issue in this campaign,” he told Moley in one of their last meetings, according to the former brain truster. “It’s myself, and people must be either for me or against me.”
In June the Republicans, torn between their heart and their head— between their feeling for their old stalwart, Herbert Hoover, and their practical need for a new face—chose Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas to head their ticket and Colonel Frank Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, as his running mate. Both men were proud old Bull Moosers. Hoover, who had been castigating the New Deal in speeches around the country for years, hoped forlornly that one big speech at the convention might win him the nomination. A smashing speech it was, but the GOP rank and file knew that a ticket headed by Hoover would buy a journey to defeat. In Landon they found a decent, moderate man, with just the qualities of common sense, homely competence, and rocklike “soundness” that the party hoped to contrast with the nutty theorist in the White House, and yet with a progressive past and reputation. His square, guileless face, rimless glasses, and slightly graying hair made the Kansas governor look like a million other middle-aged, middle-class Americans.
The Democratic convention later in June was a one-man show—even though the man was not present until the end. FDR supervised the writing of an exuberantly New Deal platform, planned the schedule, and hand-picked the members of crucial delegations, such as California’s. He also forced through the convention a vital change—substitution of a simple majority for the Democracy’s historic two-thirds requirement for presidential nominations, a rule that had tied up countless conclaves and almost dished Roosevelt’s hopes in 1932. The President had astutely asked Bennett Champ Clark, son of a victim of the requirement in 1912, to move the adoption of majority rule.
The convention came fully to life only when the President arrived at Philadelphia’s Franklin Field stadium to accept the nomination. Before a wildly enthusiastic throng of 100,000, he accused the opposition of seeking to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. “Today,” he said, “we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.” Then the climactic sentences:
“Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.…
“I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join—” A roar burst across the stadium and drowned out the final words: “with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.”
By midsummer both parties confronted a third force that suddenly seemed to be threatening. Both Coughlin and Townsend had been mustering their troops for action. They hated and feared Roosevelt, held the Republican old guard in utter contempt, and viewed each other with suspicion. The Kingfish was gone, but now two new leaders emerged. Gerald Smith proved to be not only a rousing tub-thumper but a coalition-builder. Befriending Townsend, he brought the doctor into contact with Coughlin and won the priest’s support for an alliance. Since all three men were prima donnas, a compromise candidate was needed. Congressman William Lemke of North Dakota, a longtime agrarian radical whose seamed, leathery face and rustic clothes belied his years at Georgetown University and Yale Law School, would serve. Soon he was denouncing the President as the “bewildered Kerensky of a provisional government” and Landon as “the dying shadow of a past civilization.” His hastily organized Union party boasted that it could command 25 million votes or more and at the least throw the election to Landon, thus paving the way to Huey Long’s great goal for 1940.
It was clear also by midsummer that Roosevelt had little to fear from the parties of the old left, even as balance-of-power forces. The age-old failure of the broad American labor-liberal-left to unite seemed almost caricatured in the Socialists’ internal divisions. At their convention in May they had renominated Norman Thomas but split over another issue; a large number of old-liners walked out and formed the Social Democratic Federation, leaving the Socialist party with a strong leftward tilt. Caught in the middle, Thomas saw some of his supporters move further to the left while others—including Hillman and Dubinsky—joined the New Deal camp.
American Communists also had their frustrations. Moscow’s switch to a new popular front, antifascist strategy had left anti-New Deal zealots in an embarrassing position: after lambasting Roosevelt and his New Deal, now they must support him. Yet despite their deep distrust of the President, they much preferred him to Landon, whom they labeled a forerunner of fascism. While the Socialists shifted sharply to the left, Harvey Klehr noted, the Communists passed them headed to the right. Meantime the comrades unveiled their patriotic slogan “COMMUNISM IS TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICANISM.”
The Republican campaigners were the first off the mark, and a good start it was, as Americans seemed to take to this outspoken Midwesterner with his sensible ideas and moderate positions. Buoyed by ample press support and good crowds, he attacked the New Deal at some of its weaker points and argued that he could meet the people’s needs more effectively and cheaply. As the weeks passed, however, he ran into more and more difficulties—his own fatigue, his repetitiousness, growing boredom and lack of response in the crowds. Moreover, he had no target, as FDR was lying low.
Landon’s nemesis was Herbert Hoover. Frozen out of the Landon campaign circle, thirsting for vindication, hating Roosevelt, the former President concluded that the candidate lacked fire and that he would provide it. Hoover’s attacks on the New Deal were so virulent as to be self-defeating, but in the process he and other hard-liners drew Landon into their vortex. Soon the Kansan was leveling extreme charges against his adversary. Pressured from the Republican right and the center, Landon never found a solid, consistent theme. By October his campaign was slowly and inexorably sinking, buoyed only by falsely optimistic polls in the Literary Digest.
The campaign of the Union party proved an exercise in self-destruction, performed before an indifferent press and public. Landon’s troubles with Hoover were as nothing compared to Lemke’s with Coughlin. Virtually ignoring his party’s candidate, the radio priest concentrated his fire on Roosevelt as “anti-God,” anti-American, pro-Red. The New Deal was “a broken down Colossus,” he shouted, “its left leg standing on ancient Capitalism and its right mired in the red mud of Communism.” He carried his red-baiting of the Administration to such a point, with ominous undertones of anti-Semitism, that his bishop, his cardinal, and even the Vatican rebuked him. Undeterred, Coughlin boasted that he would throw Roosevelt out of his office just “as I was instrumental in removing Herbert Hoover,” and cried, “If I don’t deliver 9,000,000 votes for William Lemke, I’m through with radio forever.” Smith and even Townsend also became vituperative, but they were cool to each other, and to Lemke. With too many leaders and too little money and organization, the Union party was in tatters by the middle of the fall.
By then Roosevelt was just starting his formal campaign. Always a master of timing, he stood aside until his foes had exhausted themselves and their audiences. His crowds seemed to get bigger and more enthusiastic as theirs dwindled during the autumn days. Spoken with power and passion but without stridency, his radio addresses were unusually effective, reaching widely across the electorate. He knew, too, when to leave well enough alone: he let friendly Catholic hierarchs answer Coughlin; he ignored pinpricks; when some of his campaign leaders almost panicked in the wake of a telling last-minute Republican attack on Social Security taxes and “name tags,” the President kept his nerve. His final campaign trips through the Northeast could fairly be described as triumphal processions.
He brought his campaign to a stunning climax in Madison Square Garden before a crowd of enthusiasts who seemed to thirst for political blood:
“For nearly four years now you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. And I can assure you that we will keep our sleeves rolled up.
“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
“They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. And we know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
“I should like to have it said of my first Administration”—Roosevelt’s voice was rising—“that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match.
“I should like to have it said—” A thunderclap of cheers and applause burst from the crowd.
“Wait a moment! I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.” The crowd let out a great guttural roar.
“Of course we will continue to seek to improve working conditions for the workers of America.… Of course we will continue to work for cheaper electricity.… Of course we will continue our efforts in behalf of the farmers of America … for young men and women … for the crippled, for the blind, for the mothers.…
“For these things, too, and for a multitude of things like them, we have only just begun to fight. ”