FOR MORE THAN ONE hundred years, ever since Jeffersonian times, presidential candidates of humane and liberal tendencies had been seeking to muster popular majorities strong and stout enough to sustain their work. Their success had been mixed at best. Lincoln and Wilson won office, but only with a minority of the popular vote against divided opposition. Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt won popular majorities only to encounter opposition inside the governmental or party system. Somehow conservative Republican leadership had been able to achieve “compact majorities,” especially in the late nineteenth century and in the 1920s. Somehow liberal Democrats and progressive Republicans had been unable to create durable majority coalitions.
Suddenly, on Wednesday morning, November 4, 1936, the political landscape seemed altered and the old hope renewed. It was not merely a Roosevelt victory, the press proclaimed, but a tidal wave, an earthquake, a landslide, “the blizzard of ’36.” The President carried every state save Maine and Vermont, swept the electoral college by 523 to 8, won the popular vote by 27,748,000 to 16,680,000. Lemke’s 892,000 votes amounted to less than 2 percent of the total. The outcome was historic: Roosevelt had won the largest presidential vote up to that time, the largest presidential plurality, the largest proportion of electoral voles since 1820; he had helped win the largest House majority since 1855, the largest Senate majority since 1869. The new House would have 331 Democrats and 89 Republicans, with 13 members of other parties; the Senate, 76 Democrats, 16 Republicans, and 4 “others.” The Democratic hurricane swept through state legislatures and county courthouses across the nation. And the Democrats for the first time made deep inroads into the black vote.
So Franklin Roosevelt had his majority, a magnificent majority in electoral breadth and legislative depth. What would he do with it? Few doubted that he would have to face up to the one lingering majority of conservatives—that on the Supreme Court. Later on, some would propagate the myth that the President, intoxicated with his success, suddenly and recklessly pounced on the High Court. In fact, the battle was long in the making, for it reflected a conflict built deep into the heart of the constitutional system, popular attitudes, and the ambitions of leaders.
The Framers of the Constitution had been deeply ambivalent toward the idea and practice of majority rule. Believers in republican government, they had to accept the ultimate power of the people as expressed in electoral and legislative majorities. But as devout believers too in minority rights, they wished to curb the power of popular majorities, composed perhaps of debt-ridden farmers, to invade property rights. For them Shays’s rebellion early in 1787 had been the great warning bell in the night. At Philadelphia the founders shaped a constitution that would thwart sudden and passionate expressions of the popular will. A majority would need to win the House of Representatives, the presidency, and the Senate before it could work its will—and its will might be cooled off in the process as surely as cold milk could chill hot tea. And if all this failed, there would be the courts, which would exercise some major, though not wholly defined, restraints on legislative and executive policy.
Not all the founding fathers favored such curbs on popular rule. Thomas Jefferson, who was absent from the Philadelphia convention but always present in the Framers’ thoughts, not only backed legislative majority rule but talked grandly about popular rule and the right of the people to revolt every generation or so. To be sure, Jefferson, as a libertarian and democrat, set as a “sacred principle that if the will of the Majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable”—it must not violate the minority’s “equal rights.” But he had confidence that a majority of free Americans would never trample on the liberties of fellow Americans as guaranteed in bills of rights.
While FDR spurned grandiose constitutional theory, he had a good working knowledge of the Framers’ checks and balances as vehicles for frustrating popular impulses and thwarting social change. He had learned even more from historical narratives, as a politician delving into the past in order to defend his positions of the present. But most of all he learned from people—from Jefferson and Jackson and their difficulties with the Federalist-Whig court of John Marshall, from Lincoln, from the judicial erosion of black rights during Reconstruction, and above all from Cousin Ted’s blasts against reactionary judges.
Roosevelt had long recognized that the High Court was no chaste and lofty sanctum protected by vestal virgins of the law against political contamination, but rather an institution drenched in politics at least since the days of Marshall. Even more, he tended to look at the Court in personal rather than institutional terms. To him Hughes was not an Olympian jurist but a former politico, presidential candidate, and stalwart Republican. McReynolds was not a fine Wilsonian philosopher but a fanatical reactionary; Roosevelt would not have been surprised to learn of a letter from McReynolds to his brother in which he described the President as lacking “brains to understand what he is doing,” as “bad through and through,” and controlled by the radicals around him. Even Brandeis—the “Isaiah” whom FDR admired—had labored indefatigably for Roosevelt’s own goals and had advised New Deal officials closely, though usually indirectly, on policy measures—and then had turned suddenly against the Administration in demolishing the NRA. “Where was Ben Cardozo?” Roosevelt said on hearing of the 9-0 verdict against the NRA. “And what about old Isaiah?”
Hence it was not surprising that the President, forced by polarizing political pressures to rise above interest-group brokerage and bolstered by his big 1936 majority vote, now would confront minority power entrenched in the Supreme Court of the United States.
The New Deal and the Old Court had almost collided in February 1935 in the Gold Clause cases. If the Court had decided against the Administration, Roosevelt had planned to defy the Court because to “stand idly by” and permit the decision to take effect would “imperil the economic and political security of this nation.” The decision if enforced, he intended to proclaim, would result in unconscionable profits to investors, bankruptcy for railroads and corporations, default by state and local governments, intensified mortgage foreclosures, a hike in the national debt—in short, would plunge the nation into an economic crisis.
After the narrow 5-4 decision in his favor, a relieved President wrote jauntily to Joseph P. Kennedy, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission: “How fortunate it is that his Exchanges will never know how close they came to being closed up by a stroke of the pen of one J.P.K.’” FDR seemed a bit crestfallen, however, that he had not been able to deliver the “marvelous radio address” he planned. It was the justices who gave the speeches. Hughes scolded the President in the majority opinion, while the archreactionary McReynolds in his extemporaneous dissent lamented that “Shame and humiliation are upon us now.”
But the gold cases had been only a respite, as the Court returned to its massacre of 1935. After “Black Monday”—the NRA along with two other anti-Administration decisions—the President began seriously and systematically to consider what could be done about the Court. During the next two years he devoted, on a reasonable estimate, several hundred hours of thought and reading and discussion to the problem. He would have had to do this even if he had preferred not to, for the press was agitating the issue and members of Congress were proposing scores of measures to curb the Court. Labor had been stung by the voiding in Carter of the Guffey Coal Act, which provided for a wages-and-hours code and collective bargaining for mineworkers, and it was now fearful of a similar fate for the Wagner and Social Security acts; its spokesmen attacked the Court for putting property rights above human rights and called for some kind of remedy. And after every anti-Administration decision the White House received a spate of letters from the general public.
“President Andrew Jackson, our greatest Democrat, defied the Supreme Court,” a Mississippi editor wired FDR. “Hope you will do the same.” From Los Angeles came a complaint about “that body of nine old has-beens, half-deaf, half-blind, full-of-palsy men.” To see that they were behind the times, “all you have to do is to look at Charles Hughes’ whiskers.” Demanded a Chicago businessman, “Are you aware that the people at large are getting damned tired of the United States Supreme Court, and that, if left to a popular vote, it would be kicked out?”
The President was aware; more than once he told intimates that there would be “marching” farmers and workers throughout the land if the Court tried to throw out the New Deal. When the Administration quietly lofted trial balloons intimating court reform, the public appeared unperturbed. But what to do? Roosevelt and Attorney General Homer S. Cummings examined a variety of proposals and found virtually insuperable objections to all of them.
A constitutional amendment? Almost anything could be done on paper through formal change of the Constitution. One day at lunch with his ambassador to Italy, Breckinridge Long, the President talked rather freely about possibilities. Long noted in his diary: “The amendments are not yet in specific or concrete form but might be broached under three headings: first, to define Inter-State Commerce with authority to Congress to legislate on the subject; second, to define certain phases of Inter-State Commerce; and third, taking a page from Lloyd George, to give authority to the Congress to pass over the veto of the Supreme Court legislation which the Court held unconstitutional.” The President was recalling the historic effort of a British Prime Minister (in fact Asquith, not Lloyd George) to overcome opposition in the House of Lords by threatening to create several hundred peers.
The President considered various permutations and combinations of these and other options but two problems dominated the discussions. The Supreme Court itself would interpret to its own advantage a constitutional amendment, unless it was drastic and explicit, but such an amendment probably would not pass. And could any amendment pass? The President often mentioned the power of a few state legislatures, heavily influenced by corporation money—$15 to $20 million, he estimated—to block an amendment. At best this route would take years.
Congressional action? There were precedents for the national legislature’s increasing or reducing the size of the Court, limiting the scope of the Court’s review power, determining judicial structure and processes, setting terms for retirement. Senator Norris asked Congress now to have the courage to pass legislation requiring a unanimous decision by the High Court to strike down an act of Congress. Others urged that Congress simply enlarge the Court by another two or three members, but Cummings in particular feared there would be considerable prejudice against “packing the Court,” as he described it. Compulsory retirement at seventy? This might appear to be a personal attack on the older justices, including Brandeis, and could easily be voided by the Court as an unconstitutional intrusion into its own domain.
Do nothing? Let nature take its course? Older justices—especially Willis Van Devanter—had stuck it out through Roosevelt’s first term; surely they would quit or die if FDR won reelection. The President, however, was not at all sure that the Supreme Court would follow the election returns, especially since he felt that certain conservatives on the Court were personally hostile to him. He could imagine old Van Devanter gleefully putting off his retirement month after month just to spite the President. He could not leave the crucial matter of timing in the opposition’s hands.
And so the pondering and analyzing went on during most of 1935 and 1936, amid great secrecy. Like Brer Fox watching Brer Rabbit become entangled with the Tar Baby, he lay low—and the Court did become more involved in a potential constitutional crisis with its devastating 1936 invalidations of the AAA and other measures. But the President would not even make the Court an explicit campaign issue. The Democratic platform offered only a vague plan on the matter, and Roosevelt said nothing explicitly about it in his campaign speeches. Implicitly he raised the issue every time he proclaimed that his New Deal would go forward if he received the mandate of the people.
That mandate came in full force on November 3, 1936, and now the President had to act quickly on the momentum of his victory, before the Court could strike down more New Deal laws. Day after day he pored over alternatives with Cummings, who used a secret White House entrance to evade the press. The amendment route was rejected, as the President and the Attorney General leaned toward two separate proposals—appointment of new justices and compulsory retirement at seventy. But each of these seemed weak and unattractive in itself.
A suggestion came in from the famed constitutionalist at Princeton, Edward S. Corwin, the most influential of several academic specialists with whom Cummings had been consulting. Why not combine the two approaches with an act of Congress authorizing the President, “whenever a majority of the Justices” are “seventy or more years old, to nominate enough new justices of less than that age to make a majority”?
About this time Cummings struck a bonanza in the departmental archives—a recommendation from an earlier Attorney General that when any federal judge (except Supreme Court members) “fails to avail himself of the privilege of retiring now granted by law” (at age seventy, after having served ten years, upon full pay), the President could with the consent of the Senate appoint another judge. That Attorney General had been none other than James McReynolds, who had served in the Wilson Administration. With glee Cummings and Roosevelt pounced on this find. Why not apply it to the Supreme Court? Linking the notion of retirement to that of new appointments especially attracted the President, with his relish for tactical combinations.
It was with this recommendation in mind that the President stood before Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes on January 20, 1937, to take for the second time the inaugural oath of office. When Hughes read the oath with slow and rising emphasis as he came to the words “promise to support the Constitution,” the President wanted, he would recall, to cry out, “Yes, but it’s the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy.” Then FDR turned to address the inaugural crowd. It was not a sunny picture he painted but a picture of tasks still undone, promises unfulfilled, human needs unmet:
“I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.…
“I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children … millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory.…
“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.
“It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out.”
All this demanded political leadership, he concluded; and he promised to supply it.
On February 5, 1937, Roosevelt revealed his Court plan to an extraordinary joint session of cabinet members and congressional leaders. They heard him with mixed emotions, some like Ickes with delight, others like Garner with doubts, still others with the deepest misgivings. Under the President’s plan, for every Supreme Court justice who failed to quit the bench within six months after reaching seventy, the President would be empowered to appoint a new justice, up to a total of six. The President did not solicit much comment; quickly he wheeled off to meet a waiting group of newspapermen.
Bursts of laughter swept the press conference as the President went over his plan. Roosevelt presided like an impresario, occasionally throwing his head back and joining in the laughter. He was savoring his triumph. His plan, he expected, would bring quick resignations, protect his big measures of the Second Hundred Days—and dish the conservative opposition on and off the Court. He would extract the conservatives’ teeth. Demanding absolute secrecy until the message was released, he took special pleasure from the surprise he had achieved.
Surprise—and shock. Riding back to the Capitol, the congressional leaders sat in stunned silence. Suddenly Hatton Sumners of Texas, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, turned to the others. “Boys,” he said, “here’s where I cash in.” At the Capitol legislators stood about in little knots, variously elated and indignant after reading the message. In the Supreme Court the attorney at bar paused a moment, sensing a sudden change in mood, after a page slipped through the draperies behind the dais and handed a message to each justice. Hughes shifted restlessly in his chair. Van Devanter looked grim; others sat with their judicial mien unruffled.
The proposal set off a fire storm in the press. “This is the beginning of pure personal government,” wrote columnist Dorothy Thompson. “Do you want it? Do you like it?” Her home paper, the New York Herald Tribune, compared Roosevelt to Louis XIV—“L’état, c’est moi. ” If the plan passed, Henry Mencken predicted, “the court will become as ductile as a gob of chewing gum, changing shape from day to day and even from hour to hour as this or that wizard edges his way to the President’s ear.” Herbert Hoover took to the air: if a troop of “President’s judges” could be sent into the halls of justice to capture political power, he said, that “is not judicial process. That is force.” The nation faced a grave crisis, opined the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of New York. “These proposals would be a death blow to our constitutional democracy.”
But it was on the Hill—most immediately in the Senate—that the issue would be decided. “What a grand fight it is going to be!” Roosevelt had written a friend. Instead of a straight fight between Democrats and Republicans or between liberals and conservatives, however, the battle degenerated into guerrilla warfare. Progressives like Burt Wheeler and Hiram Johnson opposed the bill, as did important Democrats like Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming, Tom Connally of Texas, Bennett Clark of Missouri. La Follette and some other progressives spoke up strongly for the measure. A host of conservative or moderate Democrats from both North and South opposed the bill, as did the small band of Republicans, but the latter decided to step back and let the Democrats split over the measure. Among some southern lawmakers a deep racial fear stirred; seeing sinister motives in the Court plan, Josiah W. Bailey of North Carolina said the President was determined “to get the Negro vote and I do not have to tell you what this means.”
As the factional lines firmed up, about a third of the Senate was flatly opposed to the bill, another third favored it, leaving the rest with the crucial votes. Even some of the President’s supporters, however, had serious misgivings. Democratic loyalist chieftains like Majority Leader Joe Robinson were angered by the President’s secrecy in preparing the bill, by his refusal to work with his congressional leaders. They were also put off by FDR’s disingenuousness in presenting the Court plan not in the name of liberalism and constitutional reform but on the ground that the justices were behind in their work, and thus as a measure to produce greater efficiency and expedition in the courts.
Within a few weeks Roosevelt recognized this error. Abruptly shifting tactics, he decided to wage his campaign squarely on the basic issue of bringing the Court in line with the people. At a Democratic victory dinner early in March he seemed to be in the best of humor, but his voice was stern and commanding. He had given warning during the campaign, he observed, that “we had only just begun to fight. Did some people really believe we did not mean it? Well—I meant it, and you meant it.” Once again he spoke of “one-third of this Nation” as “ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed.”
The President’s switch came too late. Already another master politician was organizing his own opposition and preparing the means of puncturing the President’s weakest argument.
That master politician was Charles Evans Hughes. Incensed by the “Court-packing” measure, eager in particular to rebut the President’s charge of inefficiency, the Chief Justice chafed under the Court’s historic self-denial of an overt political role. Roosevelt’s charge relating to the internal operations of the Court gave him just the opportunity he needed to intervene in the struggle. But how to be politically effective without appearing to be political? Brandeis, also indignant over the Court proposal, at this point suggested to Wheeler that the Montana senator ask Hughes to rebut the charge of inefficiency. Hughes not only was willing to do so but wished to make a personal appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, until Brandeis dissuaded him on the grounds that a letter would be enough.
It was. Hughes’s clear and convincing rebuttal of the inefficiency charge marked a turning point in the Court battle. Ironically the Chief Justice, that devotee of protocol, neglected to clear his letter with most of the justices, leaving a good deal of ill feeling on the part of Stone in particular. But no matter; Hughes’s colleagues were not likely to complain publicly and never did. After all, the Chief was warding off presidential invasion of their turf.
Far more momentous developments were now underway in the Court. Early in April, Roosevelt had still been optimistic about the Court bill’s prospects. Warned of the opposition’s determination both on the Hill and in the High Court, the President replied, “We’ll smoke ’em out. If delay helps them, we must press for an early vote.” But support was draining away, and then on April 12 came Hughes’s coup. In a packed, tense courtroom the Chief Justice read the long-anticipated holding of the Court on the Wagner Act. It was a vote to sustain the measure. In the 5-4 decision, Justice Owen J. Roberts was the swing man, voting with the pro-Wagner majority. He had heralded his shift earlier by reversing his vote of 1936 against state minimum-wage laws.
Why was Roberts switching? Frankfurter believed he knew why. “And now,” he wrote “Dear Frank,” the President, “with the shift by Roberts, even a blind man ought to see that the Court is in politics, and understand how the Constitution is ‘judicially’ construed. It is a deep object lesson—a lurid demonstration—of the relation of men to the ‘meaning’ of the Constitution.” Roberts’s behavior, the Harvard law professor added, had come on top of the Hughes letter. “That was a characteristic Hughes performance”—part and parcel of his “pretended withdrawal from considerations of policy,” even while he was shaping them. Later Frankfurter regretted that he had imputed political considerations to Roberts, but careful analysis has made clear that Roberts began switching shortly after Roosevelt received his mandate the previous November.
Hughes also appeared to be shifting away from some of his anti-New Deal positions, but like most politician-judges he had been flexible enough in those positions to make the jump plausible. In any event, his new stance was more important politically than judicially. He had consolidated a majority of the Court behind him; he had taken the heart out of the President’s argument about the Court’s inefficiency; he had upheld a measure dear to labor, whose interest in reform seemed to slacken after the Wagner law was upheld. And he had done all this without undue sacrifice of the Court’s dignity. The politician-judge had bested the politician-President.
Roosevelt was all bravado. “I have been chortling all morning,” he told reporters after the Court switch. “I have been having a perfectly grand time.” He compared the Herald Tribune’s enthusiastic hailing of the Wagner Act decision with its approval two years before of a famous “brief” by Liberty League lawyers “invalidating” that act.
“Well, I have been having more fun,” he went on, amid guffaws from reporters. “And I haven’t read the Washington Post, and I haven’t got the Chicago Tribune yet. Or the Boston Herald.…”
Still, the President must have sensed the change in the situation. He might have declared victory and quit the battle, but his personal prestige was now so involved that he carried on the fight. Prospects dipped even further when Van Devanter announced his intention to resign. More bad luck as well as a personal loss followed when Robinson, who had been carrying the burden of the exhausting Court fight, fell dead in his hotel room, a copy of the Congressional Record in his hand. When Robinson’s heart was ruptured, ruptured as well were the bonds of fellow senators’ personal loyalty to him—bonds on which the Majority Leader, who hoped to lake Van Devanter’s place, had depended to win the Court fight and thus renew FDR’s obligation to him. A week later Vice President Garner came in to see the President.
“How did you find the court situation, Jack?” FDR asked.
“Do you want it with the bark on or off, Cap’n?”
“The rough way,” Roosevelt said.
“All right. You are beat. You haven’t got the votes.”
Almost lost in the final smoke of battle was Roosevelt’s victory on the Wagner Act. The High Court’s switch could not have upheld a more vital New Deal measure. Like its predecessor, Section 7(a) of the NRA, the Wagner Act had helped stimulate workers’ self-organization in the nation’s industrial heartland, and had hence brought about a major redistribution of power. To be sure, the impact of the measure on unionization was limited by employers’ legal and physical obstruction, but the opposition of the bosses made it all the more central and valuable to the workers. On the floor of the Senate, Robert Wagner denounced the “organized and calculated and cold-blooded sit-down” against the law, which had come “not from the common people, but from a few great vested interests.” Make men free, “and they will be able to negotiate without fighting.”
Men and women were already making themselves free. During 1936 and early 1937 tens of thousands of workers took matters into their own hands in the big auto, steel, rubber, and other mass-production industries of the nation. While Lewis and other CIO leaders were busy separating themselves from the AFL and deciding on a grand strategy for organizing big industry, rank-and-file leaders were using a most marvelous weapon—the sit-down. Employed during the mid-thirties by coal miners throughout Europe and by textile workers in India, the sit-down was a ready instrument of spontaneous, militant action. In the United States during 1937, 400,000 workers conducted almost 400 sit-down strikes in more than a dozen industries, and in the process transformed—for a time at least—the industrial world they lived in.
It was a simple but daring device. Workers merely sat down amid their assembly lines—perhaps on the auto cushions they were supposed to install. If it was a “quickie” sit-down, workers would resume work after a few minutes, having sent their message to management. If it lasted days or weeks, workers’ friends and family sent in food and blankets. No need to set up picket lines; no need to worry about scabs. Management would hesitate to drive the strikers out for fear of bloodshed and damage to machinery. And sitting down in their own workplaces gave people an intoxicating sense of power. Some of them sang:
When they tie the can to a union man,
Sit down! Sit down!
When they give him the sack they’ll take him back,
Sit down! Sit down!
When the speed-up comes, just twiddle your thumbs,
Sit down! Sit down!
When the boss won’t talk don’t take a walk,
Sit down! Sit down!
But the very potency of the weapon brought risks. It required shop-floor leadership of rare coolness, steadfastness, and judgment as well as militancy. A long sit-down required a measure of community support, and it demanded solidarity among and between Irish and Polish and Italians, whites out of Appalachia, blacks from the South. Above all, the sit-down was a direct and flagrant attack on the property rights of owners, a challenge to conventional middle-class attitudes, and a temptation to police, prosecutors, and judges who could use anti-trespass and other laws against it.
Originally John Lewis & Co. had planned to concentrate first on Big Steel, on the theory that “as steel goes, so goes” unionization and much else. During early 1936, however, “quickie” shutdowns swept through the huge tire plants of Akron, and major sit-downs swept through the automobile industry during the following year. Encouraged by FDR’s big win over the GOP, and under some guidance from Lewis, workers concentrated on Fisher and other plants that supplied bodies and parts to General Motors plants.
Sometimes strikes broke out over an incident, as when an active unionist was fired for jumping over a conveyor line in his hurry to get to a toilet three hundred yards away. But there was a broader logic in auto workers taking the lead, and against GM. Auto workers were already famous for their youthfulness and bravado. Their shop-floor militancy easily shifted into tumultuous, old-fashioned syndicalism, tending toward confrontation and violence. The structure of work in the auto industry encouraged militance: skilled workers such as welders and metal polishers who stuck together in small groups, partly to protect their jobs; a dense system of shop stewards who stayed close to their men; and considerable direct dealing between stewards and foremen.
So General Motors was the target—and some target! By 1937 GM was the world’s biggest manufacturing corporation in number of employees, sales, and profits. It was not “big but colossal,” Fortune enthused, “the hugest technological organism of our technological age,” the “world’s most complicated and most profitable manufacturing enterprise.” Its Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac-La Salle divisions, along with its Yellow taxi and related operations, claimed 45 percent of the American market. Considered by some the best-managed corporation in the country, under the leadership of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., William Knudsen, and big Du Pont stockholders, GM had achieved a fine balance between centralized policy-making and decentralized operations. GM was tough on its executives, its suppliers, and its union employees. All this contrasted with the auto workers: undisciplined, factionalized, poorly coordinated, infested with spies for GM. It was David versus Goliath, and of course David had to win.
“The most critical labor conflict of the nineteen thirties,” as Walter Galenson called it, erupted in Flint as 1937 dawned, and swept through Toledo, Detroit, and other cities. Flint set the pace. Organized in squads of fifteen under a captain, the sit-ins there carried on strike duties, conducted health and safety inspections, played cards and checkers, attended classes in labor history, did KP, ate meals brought in from outside, and settled down at night among their products, sometimes in cushy Fisher bodies. General Motors seemed muscle-bound. A friendly judge in Flint who ordered the strikers out of a Fisher plant was exposed as all too friendly—he owned several thousand shares of GM stock. When GM cut off food and heat, strikers drove off encroaching police with a barrage of pop bottles and brickbats.
This violence projected Governor Frank Murphy into the struggle. Murphy was a far cry from the compliant Republican politicos who so often had aided big corporations in their labor struggles. Proud of his Irish heritage, devout in his Roman Catholicism, gentle in manner, he was also a stalwart civil libertarian, a committed liberal Democrat, and so ambitious as to talk of becoming the first Catholic President of the United States. Murphy called out the National Guard, not to attack the strikers but to curb violence on both sides. He also tried to mediate the dispute; when this failed, negotiations shifted to Washington, where the newly reinaugurated President and Frances Perkins pressured Sloan and Lewis for settlement. Tension mounted as the auto workers occupied another huge GM plant, a judge unencumbered by GM stock issued a new injunction, and Murphy warned Lewis that the authorities would have to carry out the court order.
While the strikers sweated it out, Lewis loudly stuck to his demand for exclusive representation of his auto workers, Sloan refused for a time even to meet with the CIO leader, Murphy kept his troops at the ready but refused to send them in, and he and Lewis had a dramatic face-off in Michigan. Throughout, Roosevelt and Perkins sought to bring the two sides together and head off a violent showdown. At last, one cold fact prevailed: the strikers had cut GM’s auto production to a driblet. Quite suddenly, GM capitulated, granting recognition to the auto workers as bargaining agent for “those employees of the Corporation who are members of the Union,” and pledging not to bargain with any other union for six months. Soon strikers were leaving the plants singing “Solidarity Forever.” They knew that they had won the battle. Soon Chrysler—but not Ford—followed GM.
As GM goes, so goes steel—at least Big Steel. Eager to crack U.S. Steel, inheritor of Carnegie’s policy of low wages and Frick’s anti-unionism, Lewis had established the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, CIO, under his longtime protégé and lieutenant Philip Murray. A warm and compassionate man who, as Murray Kempton wrote, touched “the love and not the fears of men,” Murray had a steely determination easily aroused to anger when his fundamental faith in unionism and industrial democracy was challenged. Working closely with ethnic and black leaders, claiming Roosevelt’s blessing with the message “The President Wants You to Join the Union” (he didn’t know whether they were referring to him or to President Lewis, FDR told reporters archly), Murray exploited above all the presence of a multitude of company unions throughout U.S. Steel. He would turn these “kept unions” on their heads by co-opting rebels in restless company unions and converting them into rank-and-file leaders under his own direction.
By January 1937 the SWOC claimed over 100,000 members, U.S. Steel was witnessing sit-down strikes spreading through other mass-production industries, and its chief, Myron Taylor, was reassessing his company’s whole labor strategy. His chance encounter with Lewis in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel led to a series of secret negotiations in the capital and an agreement that startled the nation. In what has been called the most important single document in the history of the American labor movement, the corporation agreed to bargain with SWOC (though only for the workers it represented), gave a 10 percent wage boost across the board, and granted the forty-hour week with time and a half for overtime. A million Carnegie and Frick workers, someone observed, might have stirred in their early graves.
Little Steel was a far different story. Led by the redoubtable Tom Girdler of Republic Steel, the heads of the smaller, independent companies not only were fiercely determined to resist unionization but had a strategy of resistance—the “Mohawk Valley formula.” Brand the union leaders as extremists, the formula prescribed. Mobilize the community by threatening to shut down the plant. Build up an anti-union armed force of police, vigilantes, and special deputies. Set up a puppet association of “loyal” employees to stage a conspicuous back-to-work movement. Have a citizens’ committee demand reopening of the plant. Resume operations to any extent possible, announce that the plant is in full operation, and denounce the remaining dissidents as thwarters of the sacred right to work.
Given such a strategy of resistance, and given a militant union flushed with victories over Big Steel, clashes and riots were inevitable. They culminated in South Chicago on Memorial Day 1937, when marchers seeking to mass-picket Republic Steel confronted police marshaled two blocks from the gate. Someone threw a tree limb at the police, a cop fired his revolver into the air, some in the crowd threw rocks—and then the police fired point-blank into the massed men, women, and children, killing ten and wounding at least eighty. Three policemen were hospitalized. By the summer of 1937 Bethlehem, Republic, and other Little Steel companies were still holding out against the SWOC. The Mohawk Valley formula was working.
Behind the great waves of unionization in auto and steel were not only pent-up demands and militant leaders but a vast expansion of production in the mid-thirties. As in the past, mass industrialization buoyed mass organization, as though capitalism and unionism American style required each other. As sales of passenger cars almost doubled from 1933 and 1934 to 1936 and 1937, the number of auto production workers rose by about a half from 1933 to 1937. Iron and steel output doubled in the same period, employment there also rising by about a half. But what rose in the great waves would drop in the troughs. In midsummer 1937 tremors of recession began spreading through the economy. The stock market slid and then a jarring series of sell orders tumbled prices to new lows.
Suddenly it seemed like 1929 all over again. People talked of “Black Tuesday”—October 19, 1937—when prices cascaded, in Henry Morgenthau’s words, “amid an hysteria resembling a mob in a theater fire.” And for a time the Roosevelt Administration reacted much in the manner of the Hoover government eight years before. The crash looked to Berle “like 1903—a rich man’s panic.” Her statisticians expected an early business upturn, Secretary Perkins reported. The President, suspecting that big business was trying to drive the market down to hurt the Administration, was cautiously hopeful. He did not yet realize that it was his own sharp cutback in federal spending that, far more than any business action, had precipitated the slump. A flurry of White House meetings resulted in little action. Then began a series of sickening drops that continued through the fall and winter as the “Roosevelt recession” deepened, with unemployment, which had been cut from 12.8 million in 1933 to 7.7 million in 1937, rising to 10.4 million in 1938.
“Everything will work out all right if we just sit tight and keep quiet,” the President had told his cabinet three weeks before Black Tuesday. He asked Commerce Secretary Roper to stop “giving out so many Hooverish statements.” But sitting tight worked no better for FDR than it had for Hoover. His cabinet members brought him more bad news. “We are headed right into another depression,” Morgenthau told him. “The question is, Mr. President—what are we going to do about it?”
The President did not know what to do about it. Berle found him “ill, tired and obviously confused.” Morgenthau found him worried about fascism abroad and the possibility that it would come to America in the form of big businessmen organizing to put their own man into the White House. And at a cabinet meeting early in November, FDR betrayed his irritation and anxiety.
“Of course, I am glad to hear from the various members of the Cabinet their sad story of how bad business conditions are,” Roosevelt began cuttingly, as Morgenthau recalled in his diary. “Last night when I went to bed, alongside of my bed was the darnedest letter you ever saw from Henry.” The President’s anger was rising.
“I am sick and tired of being told by the Cabinet, by Henry and by everybody else for the last two weeks what’s the matter with the country and nobody suggests what I should do.”
Morgenthau spoke up. “You can do something about public utilities. You can do something about the railroads. You could do something about housing. Above all, you must do something to reassure business.”
“You want me to turn on the old record.”
What business wanted to know, the secretary said, was “Are we headed toward state Socialism or are we going to continue on a capitalistic basis?”
“I have told them that again and again.”
“All right, Mr. President, tell them for the fifteenth time. That’s what they want to know.”
Wallace, for his part, thought the President should do something about labor, while Farley urged him to tell the country that he was going to reduce the cost of government.
“All right, Jim; I will turn on the old record.”
More desperately than ever the President reached out for advice, but the advice he received was still sharply conflicting. Morgenthau used the slump to urge the President almost daily to retrench even further and balance the budget. But while he and Farley wanted to conciliate business, Ickes, Perkins, and sometimes Wallace sought an expansion of New Deal social programs. Staff people were even more divided. Many in the Treasury backed Morgenthau, but throughout the Administration economists of Keynesian persuasion were pointing to the recession as evidence that the Administration had spent too little, not too much. The most powerful advocates of spending were Marriner Eccles at the Federal Reserve and Harry Hopkins, but Hopkins was ill during the critical days. A brilliant assortment of economists and lawyers scattered through the government—Herman Oliphant in Treasury, Mordecai Ezekiel in Agriculture, Lauchlin Currie under Eccles, Leon Henderson under Hopkins—fought their daily battles with memos and mimeograph machines.
The opposition was busy too. Early in December the National Association of Manufacturers, meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, adopted resolutions that to New Dealers indicated big business had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Manufacturing was “shackled by restrictive legislation, burdened with excessive taxes, continually in doubt as to the nature and permanency of government policies, crippled by labor difficulties and handicapped by inability to secure funds from investors.” When factories prospered, America prospered. The recommendations were no fresher than the plaints: Reduce taxes on business. Stop laws that reduced incentive to invest funds. Repeal laws that incited labor controversies. Produce more wealth rather than redistribute it. Above all, bolster “business confidence.”
It was a dismal December, with Roosevelt still beset and uncertain, little clusters of New Dealers meeting secretly for feverish discussion, and the recession worsening. Differences over solutions remained acute in both cabinet and staffs. The old conflict between central planners and trustbusters broke out again. Keynesians pressed for much larger spending, but they were divided over proposals for modest pump priming, heavy compensatory spending, and an attack on “secular stagnation” that would call for massive controls, planning, and long-run spending. Morgenthau stuck to his budget-balancing pitch like a man obsessed. Some advisers wanted a comprehensive approach; others would concentrate on rejuvenating specific industries, such as railroads and housing.
Amidst it all the President fretted and pondered. Never had people seen him reach out so far for advice and counsel. During early 1938 businessmen streamed into the White House on the President’s invitation to press their ideas on him. The Administration sponsored in Washington a conference of small businessmen that became so turbulent that police had to be called. The Business Advisory Council, through its spokesman, Averell Harriman, asked the President to provide leadership around which they could rally. A hundred thousand Detroiters turned out for a relief demonstration; three thousand youth delegates convened in Washington to demand a “youth act” that would provide part-time jobs.
“There is in Chicago,” Grace Abbott wrote Molly Dewson at the Democratic National Committee, “and in a very large part of the country, more suffering than there was in 1933 when the President came into office. It is a common sight to see children salvaging food from garbage cans.”
Bitterly Roosevelt attacked his critics who came up with no constructive proposals of their own. At a press conference with editors of trade papers he complained of people whose advice was in the form of “Yes, but—.” “They will say, ‘Oh, yes, we are in favor of flood control, but we do not like this way of doing it.’ Or, ‘We do not like this party doing it, or this President doing it.’” They were all for this or that but not if it cost money.
It was a set of conditions, not a theoretical breakthrough, that finally moved the President out of his faineancy. In March the stock market’s halting decline suddenly turned into a panicky drop; unemployment and relief rolls were still growing. The economic decline since September had become the sharpest the nation had ever known. And a critical set of congressional elections would be coming in November. On a train trip back from Georgia in the spring Roosevelt looked out the window at the nondescript men and women who—five years after his inauguration—were still waiting for him along the track to wave and smile. He turned to an aide. “They understand what we’re trying to do.” He knew that now he must act for them.
Once FDR decided, there was no looking back. In mid-April 1938 he asked Congress for a three-billion-dollar spending bill. Over a billion dollars would go to the WPA; smaller sums would go to the CCC, the National Youth Administration, and the Farm Security Administration. He did not forsake the Brandeisians; a bit later he agreed with congressional leaders on a full-scale investigation of concentrated economic power through what would become the Temporary National Economic Committee. An anguished Morgenthau threatened to resign when he saw his last chance at budget-balancing go glimmering. His boss was tough, warning him that he would go down through history as having quit under fire. Morgenthau stayed, reflecting that the ties that bound him and the President together transcended even this issue.
In his message to Congress the President stressed that the situation called for an act of collective will by the nation’s leadership, under the “discipline of democracy.” In his fireside chat he repeated this point. “Our capacity is limited only by our ability to work together. What is needed is the will.” Obviously the President had summoned that will, after being almost immobilized by the shock of the steep and sudden slump. Once again he might mobilize the will of the people. But could he summon the political leadership and followership of the nation?
The answer lay in a tangle of leadership elements—the President’s own morale and determination, the attitudes of key members of Congress who were both his followers and yet leaders in their own right—and in the nation’s voters, who would exert their own leadership in the elections of 1938 and 1940. The answer lay also in the linkages between President and people—most notably in the organized interests of the nation and in the political parties. And by the summer of 1938 all these elements lay in a state of discord and disarray.
Angered by opposition in Congress, embittered by the savage attacks of business leaders, frustrated by the intractability of the economic situation, Roosevelt was more determined than ever to protect the New Deal from conservative counterattacks and if possible to extend it. While he was as willing as ever to horse-trade with Congress, he was now taking the most militant and radical stance of his entire public career; more than ever before, he would use the stratagems of the fox but only to augment the power of the lion. Repeatedly during 1937 and early 1938 he tried to rally his forces in Congress and country.
Roosevelt’s inept handling of the Court bill, and above all his defeat on the issue, had made him seem vulnerable within a few months of his great mandate of 1936. While many members of Congress had sympathized with FDR’s objectives, in the light of the reactionary Supreme Court decisions of 1935 and 1936, they had been appalled by his methods. Above all, in this sixth year of the New Deal, and after sixteen months of the Court fight and other grueling conflicts, they were tired of “must bills,” tired of crises, tired of being called “rubber-stamp yes-men,” tired of bustling, pushing young zealots from the White House. Their attitudes could be summed up in the anguished phone call of one congressman to the White House in April 1938: “For God’s sake, don’t send us any more controversial legislation!” An index to the congressional mind of 1937-38 was the fate of the President’s bill to reorganize the executive branch.
On the face of it, no measure could have seemed less controversial than the reorganization bill. For years Presidents from both parties, with the help of business and other management experts, had been trying to make the executive establishment more responsible, accountable, effective, and efficient, mainly through strengthening the President’s executive controls. But FDR was unlucky—or maladroit—enough to bring in the reorganization bill about the same time as the Court proposal. Tainted by this association, the bill languished in 1937.
Next year the storm broke out in full fury. In this time of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, opponents dubbed the proposal the “dictator bill.” Still, White House forces were holding their own when an unlucky adjournment over the weekend enabled Father Coughlin, Frank Gannett’s National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, Hearst’s newspapers, and even President Green of the AFL to mobilize opposition against the bill. A blizzard of telegrams—300,000 by some counts—hit Congress on Monday morning. Congressmen ran for cover.
The President issued an extraordinary statement:
“I have no inclination to be a dictator.
“I have none of the qualifications which would make me a successful dictator.
“I have too much historical background and too much knowledge of existing dictatorships to make me desire any form of dictatorship for a democracy like the United States of America.”
Rarely had Roosevelt been forced so much on the defensive. And it was not enough. Despite his willingness also to accept some weakening changes in the measure, the House recommitted the bill by a 204-196 vote. Six Progressives, two Farmer-Laborites, and 108 Democrats voted against the Administration.
The journey of wages-and-hours legislation through legislative obstacles was, like the course of the reorganization bill, a clear reflection of the congressional mind. By the mid-thirties the United States was far behind other industrialized nations in wages-and-hours standards. NRA codes, during their brief existence, had sought to set decent wages for a shorter workweek. The wages-and-hours bill the Administration had brought into Congress in 1937 after the death of the NRA was ground to pieces between the labor-liberal bloc and the southern bloc. The main obstacle was the House Rules Committee, in which two conservative southern Democrats held the balance of power, Howard W. Smith of Virginia and Edward E. Cox of Georgia. When the bill was held over to the 1938 session, once again the Rules Committee balked. A discharge petition was necessary to pry the bill out of Smith’s and Cox’s hands.
Afraid that too few representatives would sign the petition, the Administration resorted to a typical Rooseveltian stratagem. Senator Claude Pepper, a staunch FDR supporter, was involved in a slam-bang race for renomination in Florida. The White House had reason to believe that he would win big. Since Pepper was an open and stalwart backer of the wage-hour bill, White House tacticians—and especially the Tactician-in-Chief—calculated that if the Florida congressman could be induced to speak vigorously for it, his win would be interpreted as a southern endorsement of the bill. As an inducement to Pepper, the White House turned a $10,000 fund over to his campaign. The stratagem worked. After Pepper’s decisive victory so many representatives crowded around to sign the petition in the well of the House that proceedings were delayed. Liberated from Rules, the bill passed the House by a heavy vote. Senators threatened to filibuster it to death, but after further compromises the bill finally became law in June.
“That’s that,” said Roosevelt as he signed the measure. It was a sigh of relief over the outcome, of disappointment over the weakening compromises—and perhaps of dismay over the hurdles in the legislative process. Part of the problem lay with the President himself, for the White House had failed to establish close relationships with rank-and-file Democrats in the lower chamber. When Pittsburgh Democratic boss David Lawrence wanted to bring in three new Democratic congressmen to meet the President early in 1937, FDR put him off, finally allotted three minutes, and then postponed even that appointment. “There is a group of aggressive progressive Democrats who have stuck by you through thick and thin,” Representative Kent Keller wrote the President the next year, “… and I do not believe that you have ever called in a single one of this group” to consult about policy.
As Washington returned more and more to “politics as usual” in 1937 and 1938 after the glory days of the early New Deal, organized interest groups appeared to play a more dominant role. For some bills, indeed, the imprimatur of pressure-group leaders was now as important as the sponsorship of the White House. Low-paid workers had had insufficient political strength to smooth passage of the wage-hour bill, while the leadership of the AFL retained much of its old hostility toward minimum-wage laws. The reorganization bill had had tough going because there was only thin, generalized public support for a streamlined executive branch. For spending programs, however, Congress gave many millions more to FDR than he had requested in his message of April 1938. Farm programs were continued without undue political controversy or delay. Earlier programs had helped create a huge constituency of the needy expecting and demanding such programs.
Organized and organizing workers and farmers had helped build the New Deal, which in its turn had invigorated the labor and farm movements and organizations. Thereupon the groups ran ahead of the New Deal, pressing for recognition and rewards that the Roosevelt Administration would not or could not grant. John L. Lewis’s Committee for Industrial Organization, more hostile than ever to the AFL, was one of the most militant of these groups. Once dependent on Roosevelt’s political and psychological patronage, and on legislation such as the Wagner Act, the CIO was becoming more independent of the Administration and willing to put pressure on it. And Lewis, angry over “broken promises,” was infuriated by FDR’s statement during the sit-down strikes: “A plague on both your houses.”
With his pug face wearing its customary scowl, the CIO leader wanted a payoff for his help to FDR in 1936. It was not forthcoming, as Roosevelt played his own brand of group politics. But Lewis could play his too. The transformation of the original CIO into the Congress of Industrial Organizations late in 1938, with Lewis as president and Murray and Hillman as vice presidents, signified not only a wider separation from the AFL but the determination of the CIO to follow its own economic and political course—with or without Roosevelt’s patronage.
Crucial in the mix of leadership factors was FDR’s own popularity. The President in 1938 was losing public favor, as measured by polls, not only among upper-income voters but even more among middle- and lower-income groups. In fact, the decline was not as steep as it seemed, and even at the lowest point of his popularity in 1938 he commanded the support of a bare majority of the people. But in the flush days of the early New Deal he had given the impression of much greater popularity. Public attitudes were also highly ambivalent. The vast majority—even of executives and professional people—approved of him personally, or at least “liked his personality,” as the Fortune pollsters phrased it. Newspaper reports squared with the poll results. Support was much lower for his “methods,” his advisers and associates, and some of his policies. Opinion, as the polls registered it, was significantly, but not sharply, skewed by income; of five major economic groups—blacks, poor, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high-income—all but the first two opposed the President’s methods. Running through the opposition was a streak of fear of FDR’s power and his use of it.
A determined and even vengeful President, a New Deal still not fully dealt, a Congress moving toward all-out resistance to the Administration, group interests fired with both hope and disillusion, congressional elections nearing in the fall of 1938—the tangle of leadership elements had become a gridlock of political forces. How unlock it? At some point in the spring of 1938 the President came to a drastic decision—it was high time for a party showdown, time for a purge of anti-New Deal Democrats in Congress. That Roosevelt could come to this decision was the true measure of both the intensity of his feeling and the urgency of his situation. He did not enjoy personal confrontations. He would rather manipulate his adversaries, or maneuver around them, than attack head-on.
That Roosevelt would seek a solution within the Democratic party was another measure of his concern. If the Democracy appeared to be a part of the problem rather than a solution to it, the President had to share the blame for this. For some years he had variously used, not used, and abused the Democracy as it served his electoral interests—by taking little leadership in developing grass-roots organizations, by flirting with laborite third parties in New York and a few other states and with the La Follette Progressives in Wisconsin, by building up and exploiting his personal leadership and personalismo rather than shaping and utilizing collective party leadership. In suddenly assuming active generalship of the party, moreover, the President was invading political turf far better defended than he may have realized.
Doubtless he had observed the experience of the GOP. In many ways— and often unnoticed by the national press—the Conservatives who dominated the Republican party had been trying “soft purges” of GOP liberals, just as New Dealers had been considering ways and means of overcoming conservatives in the Democracy. Right-wing Democrats and Republicans had toyed with the idea of coalition, just as New Deal Democrats and liberal Republicans had done. FDR’s purge effort was not new—but it was bigger, more intensive, more dramatic.
It was more visible and open, because the President wanted it that way. Firing the opening salvo in a fireside chat in June 1938, he lashed out at “Copperheads”—reviving the term for pro-peace Democrats of the Civil War—who in the great fight for liberalism wanted “peace at any price,” and he defined the issue in 1938 as between liberals who saw that new conditions called for new remedies and conservatives who believed that individual initiative and private philanthropy would solve the nation’s problems. As President of the United States, he said disingenuously, he was not himself taking part in primaries or asking people to vote Democratic. But—
“As the head of the Democratic party … charged with the responsibility of the definitely liberal declaration of principles set forth in the 1936 Democratic platform,” he had every right to speak out in clear instances when liberal and conservative Democrats were opposing each other.
The drive for party realignment, James Patterson noted later, was at last underway. But the President was not mainly thinking in grand strategic terms. That was not his interest at the moment. He simply wanted to rid Congress of men who were obstructing the New Deal. And he would invade southern and other states and meet his foes on their own political ground.
The conflict that followed in the Democratic party had all the intensity of fratricidal strife, along with a few touches of comic opera. A host of Democratic politicians had to calculate whether to stick with the President or break with him or somehow hide, whether to work with Republicans in an ad hoc coalition or rely on their own party, how to take some credit for the more popular elements of the New Deal without being labeled yes-men for the White House.
Roosevelt too had to calculate just how he would grant recognition or withhold it and what kinds of blessings he would bestow. The President was put to the test in Kentucky, where he was strongly backing his loyal Senate Majority Leader, Alben Barkley, over the ebullient governor of the state, A. B. “Happy” Chandler. Greeting the presidential train, Happy deftly slid into the presidential limousine to take his bows too, while Barkley smoldered and Roosevelt maintained his usual sang-froid. As the “purge train” continued on its way, the President gave his apostolic benediction to good friends like Congressmen Lyndon Johnson and Maury Maverick in Texas, delicately criticized Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina for allegedly saying that a family could live on fifty cents a day, and later, in Maryland, stumped for two days against the urbane Senator Millard Tydings.
The hardest confrontation for Roosevelt came in Georgia, his “adopted state,” where the venerable Senator Walter George was fighting off a challenge from Lawrence Camp, a young attorney hand-picked by the Administration. While George sat impassively on the platform a few feet away, the President addressed a throng of 50,000 persons at Barnesville:
“Let me make it clear,” he said, that the senator “is, and I hope always will be, my personal friend. He is beyond question, beyond any possible question, a gentleman and a scholar.” But a candidate had to answer two questions, FDR went on. “First, has the record of the candidate shown, while differing perhaps in details, a constant active fighting attitude in favor of the broad objectives of the party and of the Government as they are constituted today; and secondly, does the candidate really, in his heart, deep down in his heart, believe in those objectives?” George, he asserted, could not answer yes.
“Mr. President,” said the senator when Roosevelt finished, “I want you to know that I accept the challenge.”
“Let’s always be friends,” Roosevelt replied smilingly.
The purge had provoked the nation’s press. Editors and columnists condemned Roosevelt’s “meddling” in “local” elections. Cartoonists pictured him as a donkey rider, a pants kicker, a big-game hunter. A White House cabal was sounding the death knell of representative government, former brain truster Raymond Moley wrote in Newsweek. Liberals criticized the President for conducting the purge in an improvised, unplanned way. Feeling was most intense within the Democracy. Some party leaders evaded the issue: Farley was in Alaska part of the time, and Garner, increasingly turned off by the New Deal, would not meet the President in Texas. Southern conservatives were the most bitter; to them the purge was an assault on the southern way of life as well as on their own power in the party. The southern people, said Senator Glass, “may wake up too late to find that the negrophiles who are running the Democratic Party now will soon precipitate another Reconstruction period for us.”
With their votes southern whites gave their verdict: the South would remain unreconstructed. George, Smith, and Tydings, FDR’s chief targets, all won decisively. Maverick and other FDR supporters—though not Lyndon Johnson—lost in Texas. While Barkley beat Chandler in Kentucky, several anti-New Dealers or semi-New Dealers won in northern states. FDR had one small but pleasing consolation prize. His friends in New York had used both American Labor party support and Democratic bosses to replace John O’Connor, FDR’s foe on the Rules Committee, with James H. Fay, a war veteran with impeccable Irish antecedents. Still, the purge had been a “bust,” as Farley had predicted. Said the President glumly, “It takes a long, long time to bring the past up to the present.”
But the nadir of FDR’s fortunes was yet to come. In the fall congressional elections the Republicans almost doubled their strength in the House and added eight senators to their small band in the upper chamber. While the liberal bloc in the House was halved, the Republicans lost not a single seat. Some promising Republicans with fresh appeal won in statewide elections as well: Leverett Saltonstall in Massachusetts, Robert A. Taft in Ohio, John Bricker in Ohio, Harold Stassen in Minnesota, while the young Tom Dewey almost overcame the redoubtable Herbert Lehman for governor of New York. A trio of progressive governors failed of reelection: Frank Murphy in Michigan, Philip La Follette in Wisconsin, Elmer Benson in Minnesota.
The President sought to play down the results. In the time-honored way of Presidents explaining midterm election setbacks, he contended that the trouble lay in local scandals and squabbles, labor strikes, poor candidates. And after all, his party still held big majorities in the House and Senate. But one fact could not be blinked: Franklin D. Roosevelt had suffered his first major electoral defeat in eighteen years.
FDR would willingly defy conservatives but not constituents. If it was a mark of his courage that he would press his fight for liberalism following his Court-packing and other legislative defeats and the “Roosevelt recession,” it was a mark of his caution that he took a much more moderate posture after the congressional and state election returns of 1938. He told the new Congress in January 1939 that “having passed the period of internal conflict in the launching of our program of social reform,” he and they must now “preserve our reforms.” Not that he would surrender the New Deal ship. He warned the Democracy, in a Jackson Day dinner speech, against being the “Democratic Tweedledum” to a “Republican Tweedledee.” And he made a spate of major appointments guaranteed to raise conservative hackles: Hopkins to follow Roper as Secretary of Commerce, the now unemployed Frank Murphy to take Cummings’s place as Attorney General, Frankfurter to replace Cardozo in Holmes’s old seat on the Supreme Court, William O. Douglas to succeed Brandeis on the high bench.
But if Roosevelt would not retreat, he would not advance. He reverted once again to his old economic orthodoxy, refusing to equalize old-age benefits between rich and poor states by raising the federal contribution to Social Security. “Not one nickel more,” he said. “Not one solitary nickel. Once you get off the 50-50 matching basis the sky’s the limit.” He refused to support Wagner’s proposed national health program embracing medical insurance and funds for child and maternity care, public health services, and hospital construction. He complained to Morgenthau, according to the secretary, that he was “sick and tired of having a lot of long-haired people around here who want a billion dollars for schools, a billion dollars for public health.”
The President now seemed almost rueful about his public image. “You undergraduates who see me for the first time,” he told a delighted student audience at Chapel Hill, “have read … that I am, at the very least, an ogre—a consorter with Communists, a destroyer of the rich, a breaker of our ancient traditions.” They had heard, he went on amid laughter, that he had invented the economic royalist, was about to plunge the nation into both war and bankruptcy, and “breakfasted every morning on a dish of ‘grilled millionaire.’
“Actually I am an exceedingly mild mannered person—a practitioner of peace, both domestic and foreign, a believer in the capitalistic system, and for my breakfast a devotee of scrambled eggs.”
Even if the President had wished to expand the New Deal, Congress would have stopped him. The election results had bolstered southern committee chairmen as the power elite on Capitol Hill. They not only held the balance of power between Republicans and New Deal Democrats but used the ancient weapons of congressional attack on presidential leadership. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Texan Martin Dies, renewed its jabs at Ickes, Hopkins, Perkins, and other officials for their “softness on communists.” Another committee under Howard W. Smith exposed reds and irregularities in the National Labor Relations Board. A conservative coalition of southern Democrats attacked the President’s crucial appointing power, both by enforcing “senatorial courtesy” against top appointments and by restricting the political activities of lower-echelon federal employees. Even more, Congress slashed funds for some New Deal agencies, and especially for administrative functions that in the long run might critically influence the impact of programs—planning, research, economic analysis, information, staffing.
The New Deal lived on, however, in substance and style—and no one personified it more arrestingly than Eleanor Roosevelt. It was in these waning days of the domestic New Deal that she moved to the fore as a leader extraordinarily sensitive to needs her husband’s program had not fully met. It was not surprising that she would work for women’s rights, or concern herself with dire problems of housing, health, and poverty in field and factory, or devote an enormous amount of time to the plight of the nation’s young people, several million of whom lacked jobs.
But the First Lady advanced as well into the nation’s most sensitive political and social battlefield—the needs and rights of black Americans. She established close working relationships with black leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter White while her husband remained cautious. She strongly supported an antilynching bill, in contrast to her husband, who deplored the horrifying lynchings in the South but dared not recommend legislation for fear of alienating southern congressional leaders who could kill or mutilate his other measures.
Eleanor Roosevelt not only had to cope with her husband’s caution, with aides close to Roosevelt who fretted over the pressure that black leaders put on their boss, with attacks on her in Congress, but had to walk a delicate line between respect for her husband’s political situation and her own right to speak and act for herself. Even more, she had to cope with herself—with her own class and cultural origins, with the influence on her of a great-aunt who had had slaves as personal servants, and with her own tendency to use words like “darky” and “pickaninny.” She learned as she led, and led as she learned.
Her symbolic role came to a magnificent climax in the spring of 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to permit Marian Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall. The First Lady promptly resigned her membership in the DAR and set about, with the enthusiastic help of Ickes and the permission of the President, to help make arrangements for the contralto to sing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Seventy-five thousand people mustered at the base of the memorial and along the Mall, a setting that Ickes called “unique, majestic, and impressive.” Marian Anderson began her performance with “America,” a paean to liberty. She ended it with “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” an ode to justice and a reminder of inequality.
Why did you lose? The Nation had asked the three progressive governors who failed of reelection in 1938, and the answers were revealing. They saw their defeats as part of a national reaction against the New Deal. People believed that government somehow “had muffed the ball,” said La Follette, that it “had tried to do the right thing, but that in spite of all our relief spending, pump-priming, and social legislation we were back where we started from—in the midst of depression.” Benson of Minnesota and Murphy of Michigan also saw the Roosevelt recession—though they did not call it that—as the underlying problem, especially in the farm areas of their states. La Follette quoted an agricultural economist on the big Republican gains among farmers: “I guess you can’t beat the price of cheese.”
Some New Dealers decided by the late thirties that the Administration had not only mismanaged the economy but mismanaged the New Deal itself. FDR’s lieutenants came in for a full share of blame. The peppery, cantankerous Ickes caused endless friction as he fought with all comers— Johnson, Morgenthau, Perkins, Hopkins, and especially Wallace. Other rivalries heating up in the Administration were fair game for Washington reporters. The President frowned on these conflicts, but his administrative methods seemed to encourage them; he even appeared to enjoy pitting bureaucrat against bureaucrat. He delegated power so loosely that agency chiefs found themselves entangled in crisscrossed lines of authority. That New Deal programs were uncoordinated and improvised also made for friction. And the President was often an enigmatic boss.
“You are a wonderful person but you are one of the most difficult men to work with that I have ever known,” Ickes blurted out to FDR one day, according to his diary.
“Because I get too hard at times?” Roosevelt asked.
“No, you never get too hard but you won’t talk frankly even with people who are loyal to you and of whose loyalty you are fully convinced. You keep your cards close up against your belly.”
Some have found method in FDR’s administrative madness. His technique of fuzzy delegation, according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “often provided a testing of initiative, competence and imagination which produced far better results than by playing sale by the book.” By flouting the administrative rule of “making a mesh of things,” even at the risk of making a mess of them, the President avoided hardened arteries of structure and control. And as usual he was willing to take on the burden of salving the aches and lacerations that resulted from the administrative infighting.
Yet Roosevelt himself had serious qualms about this way of running things. Since his years in the Navy Department he had maintained a strong interest in executive leadership, planning, and management. He set up an Executive Council of cabinet officers in 1933 and later a National Emergency Council of wider membership; these dwindled into mere clearinghouses of information. By 1936 the President was so troubled by the organizational confusion and policy disorder of the New Deal that he was surprised the Republicans did not make it a crucial issue in the campaign. Realizing that “the President needs help,” he established the Committee on Administrative Management, which developed many of the proposals that made up his ill-fated reorganization proposal of 1937. One of the committee’s few recommendations that survived the legislative gantlet was its proposal that the President be given six assistants with “a passion for anonymity.”
If the President wanted better management, why did he tolerate and even encourage tangled lines of organization, duplication of effort, and administrative cross-purposes in the executive branch? Partly because he had no choice. He utterly lacked the personnel, machinery, and power for centralized supervision and management. For six years the President’s staff consisted of a press aide, an executive assistant, a bevy of devoted secretaries, one or two speech writers, a legal counsel, and a handful of advisers from outside the White House. To hold the scattered strings of administrative control in his own hands, to get his instructions carried out, to keep subordinates from ganging up on him, even to find out what was going on in the lower echelons, he had his lieutenants come to him, be dependent on him, confide in him, let him pass out rewards and penalties. Hence the Chief Executive became also Chief Disorganizer and Chief Manipulator.
Even more, the disarray of presidential management and planning was part of the peculiar American system of checks and balances in the structure of the federal government and indeed in the whole federal-state-local pyramid of government. There was nothing FDR could do about this; the Framers of the Constitution had bequeathed it all, and the essential structure had not altered in a century and a half. Roosevelt had to work with all the blockages, slowdowns, veto traps, and compromises built into a system deliberately fashioned to thwart rapid governmental response to popular majorities and to thwart consistent and continuous follow-through on policy and program.
The crucial test for Roosevelt was his capacity to wring from the system as much of a New Deal program as was possible, and he met this test magnificently. Day after day, he patiently, cunningly, even cynically, pulled strings, played on men’s ambitions, exploited their vanities, applied soothing syrup—inspired them, manipulated them, raised them up, put them off, and eased them away when they were no longer useful to him.
He did all this so well, indeed, that he may never have recognized how much the system eroded the substance and impact of his New Deal programs. Even more, he never truly confronted the system that in the end would defeat him. All his personal politicking, coaxing, and manipulating could not pack the Supreme Court or purge Congress or reorganize the executive branch, but he was successful enough in his daily maneuvering and dealing to achieve at least half-victories on many policies. Indeed, these partial victories may have helped the President to misconceive the constitutional system of delay and deadlock that he faced. In calling for Court reform he had described President, Congress, and judiciary as three workhorses proceeding in harness, and he had rebuked the Supreme Court for not doing its part on the team. But the Framers had not set up the federal government to be a team—quite the opposite.
The problem was that the President faced more than groups of legislators and judges and bureaucrats who happened to differ with him. He confronted men and women who were leaders of institutions that had different constitutional foundations, traditions, career patterns, political constituencies, and ideological or policy outlooks than the President’s. Hence to attack individuals in these institutions was not only to trigger opposition from their friends and followers but to activate the full powers of the institutions themselves. To challenge a congressional committee chairman like Senator George meant taking on the seniority system and all that went with it. To seek to add members to the Supreme Court was to challenge the whole judicial system. To curb the independence of an agency like the Army Corps of Engineers or the Federal Reserve Board was to activate a host of client interests backing such agencies. Inevitably New Deal programs were morselized in the ensuing clashes.
In olden times a President in this predicament might have used his leadership of the governmental and party team to put through party programs over opposition in Congress, state governments, and even the judiciary. This choice was not open to FDR by the late 1930s, for he had not been a strong party leader and his party was not unified philosophically or organizationally. The Democratic party by the mid-nineteenth century had lost much of its egalitarian spirit of Jeffersonian days and had become an alliance of northern commercial and southern agrarian interests and a vehicle of compromise over slavery. For a century, beginning with Martin Van Buren and continuing through FDR, the party had honored a largely unspoken bargain: Northerners would be granted the presidential nomination, Southerners would maintain balance-of-power control in Congress. And this bargain embraced an even less spoken one: northern Democrats would not threaten white hegemony in the South in a quest for black votes. Woodrow Wilson, of southern background, had scrupulously lived up to this bargain, as had FDR less scrupulously in expressing sympathy for the plight of blacks but shunning civil rights legislation.
The Democracy was weakened and compromised in other ways as well. The adoption of the primary system and the other middle-class, “good government,” and antiparty reforms in the early years of this century had robbed the party leadership of its most potent tool—control over nominations. Many city and other local elections had become nonpartisan, at least in form, and party patronage had been curbed. Since 1933 Jim Farley had provided skillful leadership in Washington, but the party as an organization was withering at the grass roots. It had become too spindly in most rural and small-town areas, too muscle-bound in many urban, “boss-ridden” precincts, and too conservative and conventional in general to recruit the millions of workers, youths, elderly persons, women, and others who were now turning to their own organizations. The Democracy, which had originally gathered strength as a mass movement under “radical” leadership, had lost its power to mobilize the masses.
Nor was FDR the man to recruit and mobilize the tired and tattered battalions left in the party. Few Presidents had ignored or bypassed their party organizations more than he had. During the emergency year of 1933 he had played down his role of party leader even to the extent of shunning Jefferson Day celebrations. We are thinking, he said piously the next year, “about Government, and not merely about party.” That same year he backed Bob La Follette and other Progressive candidates over Democratic party nominees but cold-shouldered the “left-wing” Upton Sinclair, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in California. In 1936 he leaned heavily on Farley and the national Democracy but bypassed the party in setting up a separate election group of laborites and the “nonpartisan” Good Neighbor League. Both these groups worked for Roosevelt in particular but not for Democratic party candidates in general.
Then, in 1938, the “nonpartisan” leader who had brought the Democratic party great victories but also neglected and bypassed it, suddenly, with lizardlike rapidity, dubbed himself “head of the Democratic party,” held himself responsible for carrying out the party program, and began purging the party of its unfaithful. Roosevelt watchers were bewildered: what strategy was FDR following now? During his first year or two, during the emergency days, it had been a strategy of bipartisanship, as Roosevelt tried to unite both parties behind the NRA and other programs. Then he had switched to a conventional party strategy of uniting the Democracy by devoting much time and political capital to mediating between northern liberals and southern conservatives, at the risk of alienating labor, urban, and left-wing leaders. This approach helped him win his nationwide victory in 1936, but then, with his Court-packing and other ventures he had moved left in search of a different political base. The difference between an electoral victory for Roosevelt and his party in 1936 and a collective victory for his liberal program became clear as his personal coalition collapsed in 1937 and 1938 in the face of counterattacks by southern conservatives and desertions by some northern progressives and laborites.
The Grand Strategist appeared to be more a Grand Experimenter. But Roosevelt had the fine quality of learning from his victories and defeats. He had learned from the purge something about the outer limits of his power to reshape the Democratic party in the South. His defeats at the hands of George et al. and his inability even to gain a toehold in such bastions as Senator Glass’s Virginia had suggested that a quick and improvised personal campaign was not enough; only a carefully planned, comprehensive, and long-run effort had any chance of overcoming such redoubts. At the same time his success in ousting O’Connor in Manhattan indicated that there might be more possibilities in the North than the President had realized.
What were those possibilities? The most arresting had for some years been a dream of a number of Democrats—including at times of Roosevelt himself. This was to convert the Democratic party into the clearly liberal-left party of the nation. “We’ll have eight years in Washington,” Tugwell remembered his boss saying to some liberal friends in 1932. “By that time there may not be a Democratic party, but there will be a Progressive one.” Wallace and Ickes and other Administration leaders tended to agree. But just what did FDR intend? To make a dramatic appeal to third-party leaders and members to join the Democratic party? Or to desert his own party, set up a new progressive party as Theodore Roosevelt had done in 1912, and lead liberal Democrats into it? Or simply to try to oust southern conservatives from the Democracy and hope that progressives would join a clearly liberalized Democratic party?
The purge had proved that the last option would not transform the Democracy; even after FDR’s honest effort to purge southern conservatives, progressives did not flock to the Democratic party banner, perhaps because the effort had failed. The option of a new party was out. Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, the President was not a party-breaker. Besides, FDR was in office, while Cousin Theodore had been out of it and wanting back in. What about seeking to liberalize the Democratic party? To a considerable extent the President had already done this, in party program and policy. But it was notable that such Democratic leaders as Al Smith had not deserted the party—they had merely deserted Roosevelt. Nor were southern Democrats quitting. Even after FDR showed them the door and tried to push them through it, they refused to leave their father’s mansion— partly because it was their father’s mansion.
So eight years after making that electrifying statement to Tugwell, Roosevelt was no nearer to creating a cleanly progressive party. The reason may have been clear to him as a practical matter if not in theory. He was not dealing with a two-party system in which liberal and conservative crossovers would be easy—conservative Democrats hungering to switch over to a right-wing GOP, or liberal Republicans panting to join the Democracy. He was coping with a four-party system in which right-wing Democrats enjoyed their power in Congress and were wary of joining a Republican party that contained hosts of liberals, while liberal Republicans enjoyed their considerable power over presidential nominations and were not eager to join a party of southern Negro-oppressors and northern city bosses.
The four-party system, then, stretched across a spectrum in which Roosevelt Democrats stood on the moderate left, Hughes and Landon Republicans were near the center, George and Tydings and Byrd Democrats stood to the right of center, and congressional Republican leaders held well to the right of them. These four parties were not merely party wings or collections of like-minded voters. They were built into government. Presidential Democrats held the office, with a boost from the electoral college, which favored Democratic contenders from the big urban states. The presidential Republican party tended to dominate presidential nominating conventions. Over on the conservative side of the spectrum the two congressional parties were happy to stay in their places, partly because each had a virtual stranglehold on certain party policies and partly because, sitting cheek by jowl ideologically, they had their own conservative coalition.
Reshaping the Democracy into a liberal party that could compete with a reshaped conservative Republican party was a forbidding prospect for FDR, in short, because the parties had already been realigned into a durable four-party system. Hence it was not surprising that FDR gave up this particular battle, at least for the time being. He had good reasons to do so. His own political stock was low after the purge struggle; he faced the likelihood of losing more and more influence as he neared the end of his second and presumably last term; heightening tension abroad was beginning to affect domestic politics and might bring its own realignment of political forces. It is doubtful that the President conceptualized the problem systematically; but certainly he had a feeling in his gut that he had tried to liberalize American politics and failed.
So he would return to the “politics of personalismo”—the politics of personal leadership, of putting together ad hoc coalitions in Congress and the country as opportunity dictated, of gaining short-run advances on a few fronts instead of making a policy or program breakthrough on a big front. Once again he would become Tactician-in-Chief, the transactional leader of the Broker State. But there was a price to pay for Roosevelt and his Administration: continued administrative cross-purposes, policy disarray, short-run planning, and political expediency, counterbalanced to some degree by advantages of flexibility and adaptability in the face of increasingly visible signs of new troubles abroad.
The price for much of the nation was more severe. In mobilizing his great majority of 1936,Roosevelt had raised hopes that he was realizing an ambition that had mesmerized the American left for more than a century—that a mighty coalition of liberal reformers, egalitarian leftists, women and black liberationists, urban radicals, socialist reconstructionists, and their allies could build and maintain a solid majority left of center, win political power, and enact into law their version of the ideology of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In their time—especially in the 1920s—conservative Republicans had exploited their own “compact majority”; surely the 1930s would be the time of a united liberal-labor-left.
It was not to be. The reasons were manifold: deep divisions within the popular majority; the powerful resistances of the political system to broad popular control, as the Framers had intended; Roosevelt’s proclivity for short-run, “practical,” ad hoc ventures and measures; the necessarily experimental and tentative nature of much of the New Deal. But perhaps the profoundest obstacle to a united and effective left majority was far less visible and yet all the more powerful, gripping the minds of leaders and followers alike. This was the set of “inarticulate major premises” informing the action and inaction of American liberalism and the American left during the days of the New Deal.
The idea that still gripped the American mind in the 1930s, as it had in the previous century and the century before that, was liberty—the “most precious trait,” John Dewey called it, the “very seal of individuality.” But the idea of liberty—or freedom—was still more a source of ambivalence than of coherence in the American consciousness. Just as the idea had been used both to defend and to attack first slavery and then capitalist power in the nineteenth century, so it was used both to defend and to attack the New Deal in the twentieth. “Negative” liberty as the precious right of Americans to be protected against interference by government and other outside intruders, “positive” liberty as the right to use government for the protection and expansion of individual rights—this crucial distinction now defined the struggle over the meaning of freedom.
The idea of freedom crowned the great Enlightenment and revolutionary trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and these words could well have been inscribed on the banner of 1930s liberalism in America and of the New Deal. But to lengthen the arc along which New Deal liberal ideas were arrayed was merely to broaden the ambiguity. No one saw the incoherence of liberalism more keenly than its leading explicator in America, John Dewey. The nineteenth-century liberals who had been the dedicated and effective foes of absolutism, he wrote in 1935, had themselves become intellectual absolutists. Their doctrine had become frozen. “Since the ends of liberalism are liberty and the opportunity of individuals to secure full realization of their potentialities,” and since “organized social planning” alone could secure these objectives, he urged, liberalism must for the sake of its ends reverse its means.
Had the famous “pragmatist” given up his faith in hardheaded experimentation, in testing ideas by their concrete results, only to embrace a new doctrine? Not fundamentally. But this former denizen of Hull-House, who had shared Jane Addams’s concern over how the other nine-tenths lived and had named a daughter for her, now saw the relation of knowing and acting in a more urgent context. Ideas and theory, he wrote in The Journal of Philosophy in 1935, must be “taken as methods of action tested and continuously revised by the consequences they produce in actual social conditions.” That was the old Dewey. But the “experimental method is not just messing around nor doing a little of this and a little of that in the hope that things will improve.” This was the Dewey who feared that the New Deal was doing exactly that. Just as the experimental method in science had to be controlled by “comprehensive ideas, projected in possibilities to be realized by action,” so that method in society had to be directed by a “coherent body of ideas.” This was the newest Dewey.
A coherent body of ideas, however, was precisely what the New Deal lacked after six years and more in office. The reasons go far to explain the intellectual incongruities of the New Deal.
The heritage of progressive thought was fragmented. The heritage lived on in old Bull Moosers and old Wilsonians who were still divided over whether trusts should be destroyed or controlled, pitted the New Freedom as represented by Brandeis against the kind of national power and responsibility urged by Herbert Croly, weighed the competing virtues of legal opportunity versus equal social and economic opportunity, and debated the extent to which government should aid women and blacks and poor farmers as well as more organized groups. The national government—how big and powerful it should be, how it should be used—was still the hard question that cut through the ranks of old progressives. Interviewing a sample of elderly survivors, historian Otis Graham found them deeply divided over the New Deal, with perhaps a 60-40 split against it. Among women progressives, Ida Tarbell opposed the New Deal, while Lillian Wald and Mary Wooley, president of Mount Holyoke, “followed their progressivism straight into the arms of the New Deal.”
Durable continuities did of course link the old progressivism to the New Deal: a concern for large numbers of poor Americans, opposition to concentrated economic power, some commitment to equal opportunity to achieve social justice. These views left a heavy mark on much of the New Deal’s economic legislation—especially on securities and other regulation and on the NRA and the AAA. “There is much evidence of a direct reform bloodline,” Graham concluded. “Yet to anyone conversant with much progressive thought at the more popular levels—a good example would be Winston Churchill’s novels Coniston (1906) and Mister Crewe’s Career (1908), which faithfully represent the progressive ethos—or to anyone unable to dismiss the progressive credentials of F.D.R.-haters like James R. Garfield, Bainbridge Colby, or James A. Reed, or the slightly less angry William Allen White, the case for progressive-New Deal similarity bogs down in crippling qualifications.”
If the thin bloodline from progressivism to the New Deal left the latter with even less intellectual coherence than the former, New Deal thought did not undergo the dialectical competition with opposing sets of doctrines that might have given it force and focus. Certainly the Socialists offered little intellectual opposition, though Norman Thomas eloquently and passionately continued to pose moral issues about capitalism in general and southern peonage in particular. Defections on the left and right appeared to leave the party weaker but no less factionalized and its doctrine in some disarray.
American socialism still suffered from its historic handicap: by “swallowing up both peasantry and proletariat into the ‘petit-bourgeois’ scheme,” as Louis Hartz wrote later, the nation “prevented socialism from challenging its Liberal Reform in any effective way.” The Socialists were still unable to gain a national hearing for the questions they rightfully wished to pose for Roosevelt: If socialist ventures like TVA worked, why would not more socialism? If the New Deal had carried out the 1932 Socialist platform, as some charged, why did it do so “only on a stretcher”? Was the New Deal really state capitalism and a prelude to fascism?
American communists were even less equipped to serve the classic left opposition role of forcing the governing elite to harden its intellectual defenses and unify its doctrine, for the communists were no longer in opposition, at least publicly. It was still the era of the Popular Front, and the Communist party in the United States had prospered, by 1938 almost tripling its 1934 enrollment of 26,000. This expansion brought into the party a greater diversity of members and attitudes, and Moscow doubtless tolerated more day-to-day, freewheeling discussion of doctrine and tactics. But ultimate control of both strategy and ideology remained in the hands of the Comintern. Neither rank-and-file talkfests nor Stalin’s party line had an appreciable influence on New Deal thought during this period of softened antagonism.
So it fell quite logically to the conservative opposition, not the left competition, to establish a dialectical relationship with Roosevelt doctrine. The American right wing, however, appeared to be in as much intellectual disarray as the competing isms. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conservatism—the old “Toryism” that prized authority, hierarchy, order, continuity, stability, and the bonds of moral obligation to class and country, and feared egalitarianism, liberty in the form of license, crass commercialism, and excessive individualism—had only partially given way to new doctrinal trends on the right. But the newer conservatism had also divided into a variety of doctrines as it encountered the pluralism of American life. Even aside from the far-right groups bordering on neofascism, Clinton Rossiter identified “ultra-conservatives” such as Hearst editors, author Freda Utley, and columnist Westbrook Pegler; “middle-of-the-road conservatives” like the still vocal Herbert Hoover; and “liberal conservatives” like Walter Lippmann. Each group had its centers of thought and action: the old conservatives, in different guises, in both southern agrarian and northern Roman Catholic circles; the “bourgeois” conservatives in small-business, small-town cultures; and the moderates in the larger corporate and publishing hierarchies. Out of this congeries of conservative groupings and doctrines it was still impossible for either conservative leaders or their liberal adversaries to discern a consistent, comprehensive philosophy that would keep New Dealers on their intellectual toes.
The incoherence of doctrine was exacerbated by the ambiguity of concept that dominated everyday discourse in press, pulpit, and pub. Liberty? Not only the old dichotomy between “freedom from” and “freedom to” muddied discussion but more explicit and operational questions: Whose liberty? Liberty to do what or be free from what? What kind of liberty—Bill of Rights liberties or more recent freedoms, economic, social, psychological, sexual? Freedom under what conditions—depression, affluence, war? Equality? Of opportunity or of condition? What kind of opportunity—economic, educational, medical-access, athletic, artistic? And to start when— at the fetal stage, at birth, in preschool years, during what stage of school and in what kind of school? If equality of condition—financial, sexual, legal, political? Individualism? Independence from the government, separateness from the mass, a large sphere of privacy, removal of all improper and artificial restraints? Or individuality—self-development and self-realization? The crisis in American culture, Dewey said, could be solved by the recovery of a “composed, effective and creative individuality,” or by a new individualism through democratic socialism—a fine sentiment that also reflected the ambiguity of concepts.
Political ideas during the late 1930s took almost kaleidoscopic patterns, but to consider only what Americans thought would be to consider only one dimension. Equally important was how they thought, and how the channels or structures of thought impinged on decision-making. How people thought concerned the relation among ideas and between ideas and action, the impact of ideas on policy-making, and always the linkage between thought and power.
John Dewey had strong views about how people thought and should think, views made more urgent by the dramatic need in the 1930s for fresh ideas. He preached the need for “freed intelligence,” meaning by intelligence the “conversion of past experience into knowledge and projection of that knowledge in ideas and purposes that anticipate what may come to be in the future and that indicate how to realize what is desired.” This rather common-sense notion, however, did not appear to impress the left. In a Nation article titled “The Pathos of Liberalism,” Reinhold Niebuhr, a forty-three-year-old theologian at Union Theological Seminary, argued that freed intelligence alone was no safe instrument of social change. This simply betrayed a basic weakness in the liberal approach to politics, said Niebuhr. Dewey’s concept failed to take into account “the perennial and inevitable character of the subordination of reason to interest in the social struggle”; the idea of “freed intelligence” presumed a degree of rational freedom from particular interests and perspectives that was, in Niebuhr’s view, “incompatible with the very constitution of human nature.” For Niebuhr, all life was an expression of power.
It was a curious indictment of Dewey, who so closely linked his ideas of intelligence and thoughtful experimentation to specific and effective action. But Niebuhr’s emphasis on power was also a scarcely veiled attack on the kind of pragmatism with which Dewey was identified. This was not the kind of philosophic pragmatism, or even “pragmatic idealism,” in Bernard Bailyn’s term, that had its roots in the ideas of Peirce and James. It was not the brand of pragmatism that emphasized the interrelationship between clearly defined ends and specific means—emphasized the need of shaping ends to practical necessities and means to high purposes. It was a far narrower pragmatism that elevated eclectic experimentation, expediency, political opportunism, self-justifying technique, and automatic compromise to the level of the principled if not the virtuous.
If compelling and explicit ideas were necessary to the effective use of power in the American democracy, pragmatism of this sort could not do the job. Lacking were the intermediate ends and operational means that linked higher purposes—the broadening of liberty, the expansion of equality of opportunity—to the day-to-day actions of government that affected people’s relief checks, WPA jobs, savings, taxes, recreation, roads, parks, homes. In the United States, Tocqueville had observed, “ideas are all either extremely minute and clear or extremely general and vague; what lies between is a void.” A century later the “Tocquevillian void” still bifurcated ideas. It was not that the New Deal had no ideology but that its ideology in its central linkages was so soft and shapeless, such a rickety edifice of related and unrelated ends and means. Through the Tocquevillian void philosophy and power could not hear each other. And the less effective and efficient these programs were, the more the necessary expansion of the New Deal became compromised and politically precarious.
This central problem for the New Dealers was immensely enhanced by the nature of the political system in which they operated. Political opinions and pressures were channeled to Washington through thousands of avenues and agencies. Several hundred members of Congress kept close to their towns and precincts. Local unions, chambers of commerce, bar associations, medical societies, organized relief recipients, and other interest and protest groups had lines of influence running into Capitol Hill, the White House, and bureaucracies. Pressures on Washington were also generated in state and local governments.
If the United States had possessed a strong, essentially two-party system like the British, with the majority party responsible for governing and the minority party for opposing, effective opinion would have been channeled into some coherence. A multi-party system, with peasants, proletariat, and bourgeoisie broadly represented in agrarian, left, and center-right parties, again would have provided some channeling. But the Democratic and Republican parties embraced such wide, variegated, and overlapping groups as to render neither party clearly reflective of an ideological grouping or strongly supportive of government or opposition.
In the absence of broadly organized, programmatic, membership-rooted parties, channels of public opinion and political influence tended to center in political offices and their incumbents, from village fence viewer to President. Personal factions, interlocking with interest and other groups, clustered around these offices like bees around their hives. The fairly rigid structure of American governmental offices, mostly ordained by the Constitution or by state charters, gave a large measure of stability and continuity to the pattern of influence, as reflected in the four-party system.
The implications of this four-party structure for Roosevelt’s governance and doctrine were formidable. He was clearly the leader of the presidential Democratic party, just as men like George and Byrd and Howard Smith and (increasingly) John Garner led the congressional Democrats, Alf Landon briefly in 1936 led the presidential Republicans, and a group of little-known ranking members of key House and Senate committees led the congressional Republicans. Since his party less and less commanded a majority in Congress during the late 1930s, the President had to broker and bargain with the leadership of the three other parties. Thus his position was not wholly unlike that of a French premier of his day, constantly seeking to build coalitions under the Third Republic.
The consequences for Roosevelt politically were mixed. On the one hand, he was enormously constrained by coalition politics that constantly eroded comprehensive programs and their funding, by institutional rigidities such as the seniority system in Congress, by the absence of a powerful majority party that could sustain him in Congress and country. On the other hand, the very fragmentation of the system, the inchoate nature of opposing doctrines and leadership groups, gave him, as a master of political footwork, marvelous opportunities to push his controversial policies through the formidable but scattered opposition. But there were always limits as to how far he could carry the “policy ball,” always the question of whether it might be plucked out of his hands, as in the Court fight.
Within a quarter century of the congressional counterattack on the Roosevelt program, some historians were judging the New Deal as harshly as critics on the left had done during the 1930s. Roosevelt’s New Deal, said Jacob Cohen, had developed no new philosophy of reform, “relying on a patched up merger of Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Wilson’s New Freedom.” The New Deal marked the last act of the old order, not the first act of the new. The New Deal, Barton Bernstein concluded, could have achieved more—“in redistributing income, in reshaping power relations, in restructuring the economy, and in extending meaningful representation and participation in the polity.” Even many of Roosevelt’s more humane reforms, Bernstein wrote, had been “generally faltering and shallow, of more value to the middle classes, of less value to organized workers,” and even less to “marginal men.” “The story of many New Deal agencies was a sad story,” Paul Conkin concluded, “the ever recurring story of what might have been.”
Revisionists pointed to the critical transition days of early March 1933 as a time when Roosevelt, dealing with terrified bankers pleading for federal action, could have socialized or nationalized the banks. Still others held that, at the very least, the President and Congress could have created a national central banking system that would have given Washington comprehensive control of the banks without “expropriating” them. Such a move would have accorded with century-old attitudes in the Democratic party and would not have alarmed moderates. The conventional view had been that Roosevelt, providing strong leadership, coolly steered crisis banking policy between shoals left and right. This too was challenged by revisionist historians who demonstrated that the President during those critical days delegated banking policy to a group of conservative holdovers from the Hoover White House who, with almost equally conservative Roosevelt men, were intent on preserving the existing banking system, not fundamentally changing it.
These revisionist historians, of whatever color, were defying members of their own historical establishment who contended that even to discuss questions of “what might have been” or of “what did not happen in history” was to be ahistorical and hence unprofessional. Nevertheless the revisionists were quite right to submit at least preliminary judgments. Historians of all varieties constantly make judgments, in the topics they choose, in the facts that they select and the facts that they ignore, in allotting praise and blame, even when they do not explicitly analyze alternatives. The issue is not whether historians discuss what might have been but how well, by what criteria, they discuss it.
The most valid and crucial criterion of what leaders have done or not done is their success or failure in meeting their own standards—that is, fulfilling their own goals, realizing their own values—not necessarily the standards or goals or values of the historian writing in a later era with different values. Historians may apply their own standards, but this is a very different enterprise. Some historians have criticized FDR for failing to “socialize” not merely the banking system but the whole economy. But Roosevelt was no socialist, almost all his advisers were not socialists, his party never adopted a socialist program, and the electorate, judging from the Socialist party’s lack of popular appeal, had little yearning for socialism. That the New Deal included one or two socialist experiments such as TVA—and indeed brought that one off with great éclat—is no proof that the New Dealers or the American people had broader socialist aims.
Even less did the New Deal aspire under the influence of Brandeis and his circle to a systematic decentralization of economic power, on the ideological ground that “smallness is beautiful.” Nor did it wish to “restructure” the economy in any other systematic way—it wished only to subsidize it, stimulate it, make it more productive of jobs and higher wages. Neither did it propose to reshape power relations in any fundamental sense. It sought simply to bring labor, the unemployed, youths, and to a degree blacks into a wider and fairer balance of power.
Even judged by its own values and goals, however, the record of the New Deal was mixed. Roosevelt’s supreme immediate aim, defined by personal and party promises, was recovery; he achieved partial recovery by the mid-thirties, lost ground in the “Roosevelt Recession,” and regained partial recovery after passage of his big spending bill of 1938. He wanted to make government more humane and caring, and he achieved this for millions of the poor, by placing a floor under them, but other millions were no better off, no more secure than before. Though his tax and other proposals were intended substantially to redistribute income, they succeeded merely to a moderate degree. He wanted to make government more responsive to citizens previously underrepresented, and particularly the millions of the poor, and he helped his party rid itself of the two-thirds rule, but he had little success in either liberalizing the Court or softening the grip of conservative committee chairmen on legislation.
Why such mixed results, by his own standards, on the part of a President who combined compassion and political skill to an extraordinary degree, had the aid of scores of the most talented men and women, enjoyed enormous support in Congress and among the people for at least four years, and had the depression crisis to give his Administration force and momentum?
Was it a personal failure? Roosevelt, it is said, simply did not have the gut commitment to his values and goals that would have enabled him to fight his way through to complete victory. But the President’s struggles day in and day out, his ceaseless efforts to patch together ad hoc coalitions to put his measures through, his willingness to brook the opposition of the most formidable adversaries, his fervent and repeated appeals to the people, his tireless maneuvering and manipulating and horse-trading, his feverish experimenting in search of solutions, belie this notion.
Was it an institutional failure? The New Dealers, it is said, were trying to put twentieth-century programs and policies through an eighteenth-century governmental system; inexorably the delays and the checks and the vetoes made impossible integrated and comprehensive and massive programs of recovery and reform. Rather the system either fostered slowdown and compromise or invited highly personal presidential intervention that could mass political influence at a particular point for a brief time and put something through but not launch and sustain a big and comprehensive effort. That this was a major obstacle to New Deal success, as proposed in earlier pages of this volume, has been widely accepted by political scientists and political practitioners, most notably by the Politician-in-Chief himself, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Or was it primarily an intellectual failure? The President’s reliance on his political machinery had at length failed him, Adolf Berle noted late in 1937, and he predicted that unless FDR was ready to be not a political organizer but an intellectual leader, he would be fighting a rearguard action for the next three years. Such an intellectual failure could have stemmed from the incoherence of public opinion, the disarray of the “public philosophy,” the New Dealers’ meager or faulty theorizing. Neither of the first two of these factors—neither the fragmented and ephemeral reflection of popular attitudes nor the divided and amorphous carryover of powerful ideas from the past—provided the New Dealers with adequate sets of guides and limits to governmental action. The New Deal would have to fashion an ideology of its own, and such an ideology must consist of more than Roosevelt’s magnificent enunciations of broad ends, more than the New Dealers’ versatile and eclectic employment of “practical” political and governmental means. It would need to include the political strategies and operational codes necessary to link ends and means. Such linkages doubtless would have to include ideas for long-term party and governmental reorganizations and modernizations far more sweeping than Roosevelt’s limited and mainly abortive efforts at governmental reform.
Was there any way out for Roosevelt? Was there any idea or combination of ideas that could have generated a strategy adequate to meet New Deal goals of economic recovery and political modernization, consistent with the President’s basic values, satisfying public opinion, carrying on at least part of the progressive political heritage, and avoiding the institutional veto traps and slowdowns? There was—the twin idea of massive spending and other fiscal strategies combined with national and regional planning.
To some of the young New Deal economists, heavy deficit spending appeared to be the ideal solution to continued economic stagnation. On the whole, Congress liked to spend, especially on public works back home. The Court would not threaten the federal government’s spending power; Justice Stone at a social affair whispered into Frances Perkins’s ear, “My dear, the taxing power is sufficient for everything you want and need.” The publication of John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936 equipped the economists with the necessary technical theory and data. Above all, spending offered the President a middle way between doctrinaire economizing and doctrinaire socialism.
Roosevelt would never have read a book as dense as The General Theory, but he had something much better—Keynes himself. During the early months of the New Deal the Cambridge economist wrote Roosevelt and his advisers long and warm letters about economic policy. But in May 1934, when the President and the economist met in the White House, both were disappointed by their exchange. “He left a whole rigamarole of figures,” Roosevelt wrote Perkins. “He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.” The President was no economist, Keynes remarked to friends.
Why did not the President seize on such an enticing solution, especially during the “Roosevelt Recession”? In part because his advisers were divided, as were friendly members of Congress; some were more intent on raising taxes, controlling prices, or undertaking short-run “pump priming” until business could man the pumps. But the main reason was intellectual. Roosevelt was unable as a thinker to seize the opportunity that Keynesian economics gave him. At heart he was as addicted to balancing the budget—someday—as he was to squirreling away bits of string and hanging on to old suits. Keynes called for such massive spending, such dramatic budget-unbalancing, as to stagger even Roosevelt’s imagination. It was a middle way, to be sure, but it called for such radical and unorthodox pursuit of this middle way as to give it the flavor of extremism.
A Keynesian solution, moreover, called for an unprecedented degree of planning, not only in the fiscal areas of spending, taxing, investment, price policy, and the like, but in physical planning of public works, housing, transportation, urban rehabilitation, and much else. It seemed to be an auspicious time for comprehensive planning, which was increasingly the vogue in business, education, and even religion.
Roosevelt was a planner, but more of the nuts-and-bolts variety. During his second term he established the National Resources Planning Board and other planning entities, but these units, partly because of hostility in Congress, lacked political muscle and adequate funds. The failure of the President’s reorganization bill had left the executive branch as Balkanized as ever, hardly the vehicle for unifying the Administration and its programs. The Soviets with their five-year plans gave the whole business a slightly sinister cast, and pundits such as Walter Lippmann attacked the proposal as bureaucratic, collectivist, and authoritarian. The outcome was unfortunate. Favoring regional as well as national planning, the President wanted to extend comprehensive programs like the TVA to other valleys, including the Missouri. These proposals died in the legislative labyrinth.
“We are at one of those uncommon junctures of human affairs,” Keynes had said in the 1930s, “when we can be saved by the solution of intellectual problems and in no other way.” Fiscal strategy and comprehensive planning were largely intellectual problems, embracing the whole realm of thought from minute plans to supreme values.
To what extent, then, had Roosevelt realized his own value of equality as he neared the end of his second term? Fifty years later, historians were still in disagreement. A Soviet historian came to the New Deal’s defense. “There is no reason why radical historians,” wrote Nikolai Sivachev, a Soviet specialist on the New Deal, “should not admit that Roosevelt’s services to the monopolies does not exclude the possibility of the New Deal’s bringing about a significant change in the structure of American capitalism, that the New Deal reforms bear the stamp of the struggle of the working class and of all democratic Americans for social progress.” Facing the structured inequality in American society, Roosevelt did not become a transforming leader, but the image of a compassionate, beleaguered President fighting to tame capitalism and to deal out a new hand, even if from an old deck of cards, would be fixed in the national memory for decades to come.
On the other great value—liberty—Roosevelt’s reputation would rest more securely. Despite all the charges that big government would crush Bill of Rights liberties, these continued intact. Indeed, Roosevelt was now beginning to articulate his belief that political and religious liberties were symbiotic with social and economic freedom. Even more, he was symbolizing and inspiring self-expression and creativity among artists and writers across the nation. If, as Alfred Kazin wrote at the time, the New Deal was “weakest in philosophy,” the President was also, in H. G. Wells’s words, “a ganglion for reception, expression, transmission, combination, and realization”—and hence a leader who helped bring about at the grass roots an explosion of artistic creativity in his time.
The floor of the House of Representatives, June 15, 1938. Amid howls of laughter, members of the House are watching the antics of Congressman Dewey Short, Republican from the Missouri Ozarks. Florid of face, squat of figure, the onetime preacher has joined the debate over a bill to set up a permanent federal agency to aid the arts. He will resign from the House, the “Sage of the Ozarks” declaims, if he can help run the division dealing with the dance. He burlesques a tap dance in the aisle, amid more merriment, then rises to his toes to mimic ballet dancers. Art should not be subsidized, he says, for the only good art comes from suffering artists. Nobody can “feel comfortable or enjoy listening to the strains of Mendelssohn with the seat of his pants out.” More hilarity. The Snopeses of Capitol Hill then help kill the measure, 195-35.
This forensic lynching bee against the arts measure was part of the massive counterattack launched by the Republican-southern Democratic coalition against the New Deal from 1937 to 1939. The cultural projects of the Roosevelt Administration were especially enticing targets. The right-wing coalition used two old congressional weapons—investigation and financial veto. Witnesses before the House Committee on Un-American Activities testified that art and theater and writers’ projects were infested with communists, that the leadership was communist or communist-influenced, that in New York City the Workers’ Alliance, a relief recipients’ union, ran the theater project and the Communist party ran the union. The editor of the conservative National Republic, in his testimony, denounced art “smeared upon the walls” by reds on relief. The headlines were gratifying to the right wing, despite occasional embarrassments, such as when the name of one Christopher Marlowe surfaced during testimony and a committeeman demanded to know, “Is he a Communist?” A year later a southern Democratic and Republican coalition controlling a House appropriations subcommittee crippled the arts, writers’, and music projects and in effect killed the federal theater program.
The assault on New Deal cultural programs marked the beginning of the end of one of the most humane, imaginative, generous, and daring efforts of the federal government to meet the dire needs and enlarge the opportunities of the nation’s artists. For a man who had no great personal interest in the arts, Roosevelt had devoted an extraordinary amount of time to developing, nurturing, financing, and protecting the cultural programs, which in turn required an enormous amount of placating and conciliating the strong-minded persons involved. He did this in part because of his heritage of patrician patronage of the arts, but far more because he knew that the nation’s artists were among the most vulnerable in a depression.
Eleanor Roosevelt supported the cultural programs at key junctures, put “federal” art in the White House, and spoke up against censorship of art, telling a group of museum directors in December 1933 that it was “unbelievable that a great nation” could fail to use “its creative talents to the fullest.” Aiding and abetting the effort were tough-minded administrators—Ickes, Morgenthau, Hopkins, and many less known—who early on glimpsed the need for a qualitative as well as a quantitative liberalism. But the true heroes of the effort were the unsung or less sung leaders of the national and local programs, along with the artists, actors, musicians, and writers who, working for a pittance, responded by producing a cornucopia of cultural productions, notable always for quantity but often too for quality.
The New Deal art program had got off to an early start because the federal government owned thousands of post offices and other buildings whose walls were temptingly empty. Roosevelt had been in office hardly two months when muralist George Biddle, one of the Philadelphia Biddies and a Groton and Harvard schoolmate of Roosevelt, wrote FDR about the grand achievements of muralists of the Mexican revolution. Young American artists were eager to capture the “Roosevelt-guided social revolution” on the public walls of the nation. The President directed him to the Treasury, central custodian of federal buildings. With tentative support from such leading muralists as Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Laning, Reginald Marsh, and Henry Varnum Poor, Biddle plunged into the field of federal subsidy of the arts, amid fears that it was a briar patch.
A briar patch it was—not only of bureaucratic rivalries, but of ancient conflict between traditionalists and the avant-garde, between artists of competing schools. Biddle and his colleagues were soon dealing with problems that had always bedeviled subsidized art, whether sponsored by state, church, or private patrons. Any relationship between free-spirited artists and institutions dealing with art involved an “awkward embrace” that the honeyed words of politicians and bureaucrats could not ease. To what degree should established artists be favored over the mainly needy ones? To what extent should the “feds” yield to local control or even institutionalize it? How much artistic freedom should be allowed for projects subsidized by the taxpayers? To what degree should artists be supervised—for example, the time they were putting into their work? Who should decide what art should be not only subsidized but chosen for exhibit? What are the criteria for excellence in art?
These problems rolled in on the public works art directors in the form not merely of in-basket paper but of raging conflicts in the field. In San Francisco, newspaper editors were given a “pre-vue” of new murals in the Coit Tower created under the public works art program, only to discover a miner in one panel reading a well-known local communist weekly, in another panel a hammer and sickle and a call that the “Workers of the World Unite,” and—worst blow of all—renditions of many left-wing front pages but no representation of the establishment San Francisco Chronicle. During the ensuing flap the city park commission locked the big doors to the tower, the local Artists’ and Writers’ Union picketed the closed edifice, and the lower opened again after several months, with only one “subversive” item—a Soviet emblem—missing.
In Washington, the artist Rockwell Kent had his own little joke. Illustrating the expansion of the postal service in a mural for the capital’s Post Office Building, he portrayed Alaskan Eskimos dispatching a letter in one panel and black Puerto Rican women receiving it in a second. All very patriotic—except that on close scrutiny the message was found to be a call for freedom for both dependencies. After much amusement over Kent’s joke, the Treasury paid the artist off and blanked out the message. When Paul Cadmus portrayed sailors frolicking with “curvaceous damsels of obviously insecure reputation” in his “The Fleet’s In,” an admiral denounced it, the Navy asked that it be withdrawn from a forthcoming exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery, and it was.
These and other imbroglios hardly dampened cultural productivity. During the first few months of the public works program artists turned out well over 10,000 pieces of art and craft—over 3,000 oils, almost 3,000 watercolors, numerous prints, etchings, woodcuts, poster panels, and a lesser number of carvings, decorative maps, pottery, tapestries, mosaics. But even these figures were dwarfed by the productivity of artists working under the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, which behind the strong leadership of Harry Hopkins and the Project’s chief, Holger Cahill, got underway with heavy funding in 1935. The Art Project was designedly a relief effort, part of the overall WPA cultural program embracing artists, writers, musicians, actors, and others. But by enabling artists to do their own work, even at $20 or $30 a week, it produced an explosion of “people’s art” without parallel in American history. If the output of the public works projects could be numbered by the thousands, that of the FAP could be by the tens or hundreds of thousands—over 100,000 easel works (oil, watercolor, tempera, pastel), 17,000 pieces of sculpture, an estimated 240,000 copies of over 10,000 original designs in varied print media.
Enormous quantity—but quality? The level of work under the FAP was so varied as to defy generalization. Such artists, later to be famous, as Willem de Kooning, Anton Refregier, Chaim Gross, and Peter Hurd would credit the program with helping them in their careers. But the aim was to include as many artists as possible, good or bad, and to bring the people’s art to the people, in regional and local centers across the nation. The FAP not only promoted art exhibits and gallery tours on a vast scale but stressed art as a learning experience for the masses by sponsoring educational programs under hundreds of teachers in settlement houses, hospitals, clubs, parks, and even—especially for children—zoos. A disciple of John Dewey, Cahill believed that art was a matter less of the rare masterpiece than of vitalizing “democracy in the arts” through community participation.
The more the FAP reached out to the wider public, however, the more controversial and hence political it became. The conflicts that had plagued the public works program bedeviled the FAP even more. Cutbacks in the program in response to Roosevelt’s post-election economizing produced anger and resentment in art centers. New York artists, the most militant in the nation, marched in December 1936 to WPA headquarters on East Sixty-ninth Street, occupied the offices of New York City FAP chief Audrey McMahon, and stayed on despite threats of being blacklisted. The artists locked arms to confront the police, who dragged them out amid the thud of nightsticks, shrieks of pain, and the wounding of a dozen artists and policemen. As total WPA rolls were cut by one million from the preelection high of two and a half million, artists and other recipients could have bitterly recalled the words of FDR’s Madison Square Garden speech: “For all these things”—including useful work for the needy unemployed— “we have only just begun to fight.” Both FDR’s retrenchment and the protest of the artists helped trigger the congressional counterattack of 1937 and 1938.
One reason the art program aroused such controversy was its sheer visibility on the public walls and in the new and old art centers of the nation. Even more visible—and vulnerable—was the Federal Theatre Project. The FTP shared many of the ecstasies and the burdens of the other cultural programs—wide outreach to needy theater people, enormous output, some brilliant productions, support from the Roosevelts, especially Eleanor, along with parsimony in funding, bureaucratic tangles, censorship, red-baiting, and cutbacks. But the Federal Theatre, like the figure over a Broadway marquee, was always larger than life—in its leadership, its daring, its visibility, and its downfall.
Its head was the most striking of all the persons who ran WPA cultural projects, Hallie Flanagan. Creator of an experimental theater first at Grinnell College and then at Vassar, she had participated at Harvard in George Pierce Baker’s noted theatrical laboratory, the 47 Workshop, and studied European and Russian theater abroad before establishing her own reputation for experiment. Broadway impresarios were still underestimating the daring and determination of this small, mild-mannered woman when Hopkins recruited her, but he did not. Soon she was making the hard decisions: dealing with the tough stage unions, giving preference in hiring to skilled professionals, choosing the most controversial plays for production and at the same time dreaming of creating a great and enduring national theater out of the relief project. She collected a remarkable staff and set of associates: Eddie Dowling, national director of vaudeville; Elmer Rice, head of the New York City project, and his assistant Philip Barber; Charles Coburn, director for New England; Jasper Deeter, director for Pennsylvania.
“We live in a changing world,” Flanagan told her associates when they first met at her headquarters in the old McLean mansion on Dupont Circle; “man is whispering through space, soaring to the stars, flinging miles of steel and glass into the air. Shall the theatre continue to huddle in the confines of a painted box set? The movies, in their kaleidoscopic speed and juxtaposition of external objects and internal emotions, are seeking to find visible and audible expression for the tempo and psychology of our time. The stage too must experiment—with ideas, with psychological relationship of men and women, with speech and rhythm forms, with dance and movement, with color and light—or it must and should become a museum product.” The theater, she added, must not ignore problems of wealth and poverty, peace and war, the role of government—or the changing social order would ignore the theater.
Flanagan followed up this rhetoric with arresting productions. In spring 1936 the Federal Theatre put on the New York premiere of Murder in the Cathedral, T. S. Eliot’s verse drama about Thomas à Becket. The play, which had been turned down by the Theatre Guild, left audience members, including Eleanor Roosevelt, deeply moved. An especially innovative production was Macbeth, set in a castle in Haiti during Napoleonic times, produced by John Houseman, directed by Orson Welles, and staged in Harlem with black actors. On opening night the Negro Elks’ eighty-piece brass band marched past the Lafayette Theatre in their scarlet-and-gold uniforms, while thousands lined up for tickets. The show got enthusiastic reviews from Burns Mantle of the New York Daily News and other critics. Everyone knew, a black woman watching the show for the fifth time told a London reporter, that “this Mr. Shakespeare had always intended his plays to be acted by Negroes.”
But by far the boldest venture of the Theatre Project was the “Living Newspaper.” Conceived by Flanagan and sponsored by the Newspaper Guild, the Living Newspaper Unit operated like a city room with editors and reporters. “Great ingenuity was displayed,” Edmond Gagey observed, “in devising new technical methods or devices—employment of a loudspeaker for the voice of the Living Newspaper or of an old tenement house; frequent use of scrim, projection, and moving pictures; action on different levels of ramps with imaginative use of spotlight and blackout; playing of scenes in silhouette; clever stage business and properties to illustrate abstract points.”
No issue, no matter how thorny, seemed to daunt Flanagan & Co. The White House in effect killed the first Living Newspaper, Ethiopia, on the ground that it involved the impersonation of foreign leaders, Haile Selassie and Mussolini. Despite frantic appeals by Flanagan through Eleanor Roosevelt and the angry resignation of Elmer Rice, the show reached the boards only for the press. But other productions were equally provocative. Triple-A Plowed Under dramatized the farm problem in a series of sharp vignettes: mortgages foreclosed, farms auctioned off, crops dumped, all amid ravaging drought. Attacks on the greed of middlemen and words of Earl Browder interspersed with those of Jefferson and Al Smith did not win favor from the right—especially when it was not Browder who was booed. Injunction Granted, originally designed as a balanced picture of labor’s treatment in the courts, turned out on opening night to be a strong dose of militant unionism. Even Flanagan was upset by its leftward tilt, but the play went on, with a few modifications. Power, an attack on the utilities and a call for public ownership, was a piece of calculated propaganda; the Living Newspaper staff, Brooks Atkinson wrote, had “come out impartially against the electric light and power industry, and for the TVA.” Perhaps the most powerful of the plays, One-Third of a Nation, was the most brilliant, the most professional, and the best received by the critics. With its set showing a four-story tenement full of rickety stairs, beat-up furniture, dirt and disarray, One-Third of a Nation was a pointed reminder of New Deal promises made and still unfulfilled. It Can’t Happen Here, a dramatization of Sinclair Lewis’s novel showing how fascism could, was seen by hundreds of thousands in New York and a score of other cities.
The FTP offered much more than these electrifying productions. It embraced regional efforts, most notably in Chicago and Los Angeles, and a host of state amateur theater groups—eighteen in North Carolina alone. At its height it involved not only great actors and directors but a peak work force of about ten thousand stagehands and electricians and cue girls as well as actors and playwrights. Flanagan recognized that modern dance could express vital ideas and encouraged Helen Tamiris to develop an independent dance unit that had a brief but stormy and creative life until it was merged again with the Theatre Project.
But the FTP never shed its image of being centered in New York City, radical, and iconoclastic. Hence it was all the more vulnerable to the budget-cutters in Washington, and to both the red-baiters in Congress and the communists themselves who attacked it from the left. The FTP was the first of the cultural programs to be killed on Capitol Hill. Said the chastened but indomitable Flanagan, “The theatre, when it’s good, is always dangerous.”
It was acutely ironic that the theater and other New Deal cultural programs should have been shut down because of their “radicalism,” for they were at the heart of the revival of cultural nationalism in the 1930s. That decade, in Charles Alexander’s look back four decades later, brought a “remarkable celebration in American thought and culture of the goodness and glory of the nation and its people.” This was true “as much in architecture, where modernists linked adaptable, utilitarian design to the task of social reconstruction, as it was in music, where composers were often willing to exploit native folk and popular resources, or in the literary or visual arts, where the social and artistic values of realism prevailed.” Coming home from European or spiritual exile, intellectuals and artists not only rediscovered the American present; “as the decade progressed they more and more explored the national past, seeking enduring values, precedents for action, even meaningful legends with which to fashion the most elaborate version thus far of a usable past.”
Throughout the decade public arts programs existed side by side with private ventures. The public was not always clear as to what was “socialistic” and what was “commercial.” Thus it was the FTP that put on the musical drama The Cradle Will Rock, but it was the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union that produced the equally pro-union and anti-capitalist Pins and Needles. The federal art programs covered public buildings with murals and paintings, but independent and established artists like Reginald Marsh, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood were painting on their own. Rather than crushing private or commercial ventures, the federal cultural programs appeared to stimulate them. On occasion, feds fought one another. WPA officials in Washington, fearful about the approaching Federal Theatre production of The Cradle Will Rock during the bitter struggle between labor and Little Steel, put off the presentation at the last moment. After vain protests and appeals, author Marc Blitzstein and director Orson Welles led the opening-night audience from the Maxine Elliott Theatre twenty blocks to the old Venice Theatre, where actors and stagehands improvised a performance that would be talked about— and reenacted—decades later.
The Federal Writers’ Project was a prime example of the easy coexistence of public and private cultural enterprise. When the FWP came under the usual attack on Capitol Hill, forty-four publishers wrote a joint letter to the investigating subcommittee asserting that the work of the writers was a “genuine, valuable and objective contribution to the understanding of American life” and not a vehicle of propaganda. While the publishers unduly played down the left bias in enclaves of the project, prestigious houses such as Random House and Houghton Mifflin had enough confidence in the FWP to undertake cooperative publishing with it. Certainly the FWP needed every friend it could mobilize, as it suffered along with the other cultural projects from the usual congressional barrages about reds, waste, administrative incompetence.
The Federal Writers’ Project shared much else with its sister programs in the arts—a gifted leadership, though often erratic in the case of the writers’ program, the unswerving support of Eleanor Roosevelt and the cautious backing of her husband, the inadequacy of funds in view of the need, and the image of being a New York project despite the existence of strong state programs, fourteen of which were headed by women. It could boast of the usual huge output: around 6,500 writers in four years produced several hundred publications on a wide diversity of subjects, with the help of thousands of volunteer consultants, most of them college teachers, who helped prepare FWP manuscripts. And the quality of the output, as in the other projects, varied wildly. It was at worst pure hack stuff and at best enduring work, such as the two thousand slave narratives based on interviews with former slaves and collated in seventeen volumes.
The showcase of the Writers’ Project was its American Guide Series. Rising almost spontaneously from under the noses of the WPA planners, the idea was to employ writers, editors, historians, researchers, art critics, archaeologists, map draftsmen, geologists, and other professionals to prepare local, state, and regional “Baedekers.” But some hoped that these would be more than Baedekers—that they would dig into the roots of American history and culture and hence would become, as Alfred Kazin later put it, part of an “extraordinary national self-scrutiny.”
The series was most impressive for its sheer size and range—as though it wished to manifest the size and range of the nation it covered. By 1942 the collection consisted of 276 volumes and 701 pamphlets; even so, the FWP had still not published any of the regional guides originally planned.
Once again the quality was grossly uneven, but at its best the series presented known and unknown writers at their most creative and imaginative. For the Massachusetts guide Conrad Aiken anonymously described the “wonderful ghostliness” of old Deerfield as “the perfect and beautiful statement of the tragic and creative moment when one civilization is destroyed by another.” He also paid tribute to the “profound individualism” of which Massachusetts had been such a prodigal and brilliant source— only to provoke the wrath of leftists who argued that the good in America had stemmed from popular, collective action. The guide calmly published both views, “each in effect arguing against the other.”
Not all the difficulties of the Massachusetts guide were settled so easily. The day after the first copy off the Houghton Mifflin press was presented to the governor, the Boston Traveler headlined “Sacco Vanzetti Permeate New WPA Guide.” It seemed that the guide described the Boston Tea Party in nine lines and the Sacco-Vanzetti case in forty-one. Other “revelations”—and headlines—followed about the guide’s handling of the Boston police strike, the great 1912 strike of textile workers, child labor, and other skeletons in the Bay Stale closet. The governor denounced the book, declared that the writers should go back to where they came from if they didn’t like America, and collaborated with the state librarian in an effort to strike from the guide references to organized labor, welfare legislation, and Labor Day. In Washington, Harry Hopkins laughed off the affair, and in Boston the guide sold like hotcakes.
Other state guides came under literary attack for poor style or for history that was only guidebook-deep. But their critics missed the essential point of the guides and of the whole Writers’ Project—to mobilize hundreds of writers who in turn could dig into the heart and mind, the very bone and sinew, of the nation. They wrote mainly about people—famous and infamous, heroic and villainous, remembered and forgotten. “It is doubtful,” wrote Robert Cantwell in The New Republic, “if there has ever been assembled anywhere such a portrait, so laboriously and carefully documented, of such a fanciful, impulsive, childlike, absent-minded, capricious and ingenious people.”
So the guides abounded in people, presented often in exquisite and loving detail, like the jobless man whose opening words to the FWP interviewer were: “I admit it, I’m a hog. In other words human. I enjoy women and a pair of doughnuts like anybody else. Say tomorrow I wake up I’m covered in communism, say I can go and get what I want by asking—I want six wives. You maybe want twenty-four suits…” Or like John D. Rockefeller golfing in Florida, wearing a straw hat tied with a shawl-like handkerchief under his chin as he bicycled “from stroke to stroke, followed by two valets, one with milk and crackers, the other with a blanket to be spread on the ground when he wishes to rest.”
And so it was possible for Alfred Kazin to write that the enormous and remarkable body of writing of the Depression era, for all its shapelessness, offered the fullest expression of the national consciousness. It was the “story of a vast new literature in itself, some of it fanatical or callow, some of it not writing at all, much of it laboriously solid and curious and humble, whose subject was the American scene and whose drive was always the need, born of the depression and the international crisis, to chart America and to possess it.” And because much of this literature dealt with the 1930s, inevitably much of it dealt with economic hope and despair.
“Jus’ let me get out to California,” says Grandpa Joad. “Gonna get me a whole big bunch of grapes off a bush, or whatever, an’ I’m gonna squash ’em on my face an’ let ’em run offen my chin.” Getting to California—the Joads have been thinking of this for months. The real Joads were the half-million refugees created when the great dust storms swept through the Plains and border states, reducing almost 100 million acres to dust. For a time the uprooted became wanderers, traveling like sleepwalkers, but most were headed west in rattletrap cars and trucks, in a grim reenactment of the American dream. Headed west to California, the last paradise, where the land was rich and jobs were for the asking. But their hopes were blighted—as Ma Joad had expected, the promises had been “too nice, kinda.”
John Steinbeck had made this trek too. In 1939 he published the novel that documented the Okie experience, The Grapes of Wrath. In California his family, the Joads, encounter the people in paradise: farm owners who offer jobs to migrants at starvation wages—take it or leave—and sheriffs who move them like cattle from miserable camp to worse camp and Californians who hiss “Okie” at them no matter what state they hail from. The Joads’ meager savings evaporate; they find no place to rest; they are abused, tricked, exploited. The family falls apart—the grandparents die, a son-in-law deserts, a baby is stillborn, a son avenges a preacher by attacking a strikebreaker. In the end a tremendous rain descends, like a second Flood, and this ironic rain, whose absence had denied the Joads life in Oklahoma, now forces them to take cowering refuge in a barn. They must leave behind their truck, their belongings. They have nothing left.
Steinbeck’s book set off a fire storm of controversy and made the thirty-seven-year-old novelist famous. Inevitably attacked as a Communist propagandist, Steinbeck in fact had made one of the principal themes of an earlier novel, In Dubious Battle, the darker side of Communist activists— their fanaticism, their subordination of the strikers’ needs to the party’s political goals, their provocativeness, and hence the “dubiousness” of the battle. Far from advocating communism, The Grapes of Wrath offered no coherent program whatever but rather a mystic union of Emerson’s transcendentalism, Whitman’s mass democracy, and Jefferson’s agrarian populism. It beckoned readers back to the time when men and the land were one, when greed yielded to selflessness, “for the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we.’” A federal migrant camp offers a glimpse of Utopia, where the life-principles are cooperation and sharing, and where the Joads have a few weeks to learn to “feel like people again.”
But Steinbeck speaks best through his characters. Ma Joad, indomitable defender of the family unit against all comers: “Use’ ta be the fambly was fust. It ain’t so now. It’s anybody. Worse off we get, the more we got to do.” Jim Casy, a preacher who accompanies the Joads to California and has given up conventional Christianity for the faith that “all men got one big soul ever’-body’s a part of.” Young Tom Joad, who lakes on Casy’s burden when the preacher is murdered for leading a migrant workers’ strike, assaults the murderer, and must flee. But, he tells his mother, “I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.… An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”
Woody Guthrie was there too, a real-life Okie who rode the freights through the South and Southwest during the dust bowl years, playing and singing to anyone who would listen. Growing up in a disintegrating home, in his teens he was an “alley rat” living among old cowboys and onetime outlaws and plain down-and-outers, listening to their yarns about the glory days of the West. When the dust storms hit in the spring of 1935, Woody was still only a twenty-three-year-old soda jerk in Pampa, Texas, but then he began to travel. “This dusty old dust is a-getting my home / and I’ve got to be drifting along.…”
On the road, thrown among the dust-blown, Guthrie’s alley-rat “I” was transmuted into an impassioned “we.” He “had never considered himself part of any group before,” according to Joe Klein. “But here he was, an Okie, and these were his people.” And as more and more he saw what was happening to them, his music took on a new bite. “I never did make up many songs about the cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky, but at first it was funny songs of what all’s wrong, and how it turned out good or bad. Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in that country was thinking.” Guthrie gathered a repertoire of old tunes—ballads, hymns, country blues—from hoboes and migrants and fitted his own lyrics to them. “The way I figure, there are two kinds of singing and two kinds of songs,” he said. “Living songs and dying songs.” He would sing both. Drawing from the Wobblies’ old Little Red Songbook, his lyrics became more pointed in pathos and politics:
We got out to the West Coast broke,
So dad gum hungry I thought I’d croak,
And I bummed up a spud or two,
And my wife fixed up a ’tater stew.
We poured the kids full of it.
Mighty thin stew, though: you could read a magazine right through it.
Always have figured that if it had been just a little bit thinner some of these here politicians could have seen through it.
Two thousand miles to the east, the trouble with Studs Lonigan is that he cannot speak his true feelings, deep and powerful feelings of revolt against Chicago’s drab Irish middle class, with its petty aspirations and empty values and spiritual poverty. Studs is crushed between a latent conscience desperate to emerge, which enables him to grasp vaguely that something is wrong with his world, and his lack of knowledge, either of himself or of society, that would make his rebellion effective. Robbed of any model for revolt, Studs falls back on the hackneyed American rebel of dime novels and juvenile fantasies, on the model of the tough guy as boxer, outlaw, hoodlum, soldier, or teen gang leader. Shadowboxing before a mirror, cursing his sister, drinking himself into a stupor, strutting among his adolescent admirers, Lonigan must constantly affirm to himself that he is indeed “real stuff.” But by adopting the pose and vocabulary of the tough guy, he can neither fully tolerate nor articulate genuine emotions and impulses.
In the park with Lucy, the fifteen-year-old Studs has a feeling “that seemed to flow through him like nice warm water,” but he feels “goofy and fruity about having it, and felt that he hadn’t better let anyone know he had thoughts like that. … If some of the kids knew what he was doing and thinking, they’d laugh their ears off.” How can he express his feeling to Lucy? “He couldn’t even say a damn thing about how it all made him want to feel strong and good, and made him want to do things and be big and brave for her.” So when he parts from her in frustration he feels “more and more of a hell of a Goddam goof.” After this moment of feeble perception the shutters close once again, and Studs spends the rest of his life caught between growing apprehension of early death and pathetic nostalgia for lost chances. He dies in 1931 at the age of thirty, of heart failure.
The man who created Studs Lonigan, James T. Farrell, himself was raised in an Irish middle-class home in Studs’s Chicago neighborhood. The author believed that only his critical instinct and his intellectual curiosity had saved him from Studs’s fate. He was lucky enough to have had good teachers, who encouraged him in his writing and wide reading, strengthened his self-confidence, and opened the shutters wide for the literary and intellectual worlds that lay beyond. Studs never had such teachers, such leaders, who could have responded to his wants and needs, protected and bolstered his self-esteem, taught him some skills, and encouraged him to self-fulfillment. In leaving Studs as a youth of suppressed conscience unable to rise to moral consciousness and hence unequipped to move on to political or some other collective action, Farrell personified the masses of Americans imprisoned in enclaves of self-doubt, self-hate, and self-destruction.
The fictional Studs Lonigan of Chicago would never have met the fictional Bigger Thomas of Chicago, except perhaps during the real-life race riot of 1919, which began when a black youth at a segregated beach stepped into “white waters” and ended with the deaths of twenty-two blacks and fourteen whites. Studs and his gang were there. “The streets were like avenues of the dead. They only caught a ten-year-old Negro boy. They took his clothes off, and burned them. They burned his tail with lighted matches, made him step on lighted matches, urinated on him, sent him off running naked with a couple of slaps in the face.” Bigger Thomas might have been there, momentarily freed from his cage. He lives with his mother, brother, and sister in a squalid one-room apartment in Chicago’s black belt. Unlike the Joads, the Thomases do not even begin as a prideful family; they taunt and nag and torment one another. Bigger is locked in a cage of unemployment, ignorance, petty criminality, fearful hatred of whites and even blacks. He knows that the moment he becomes fully conscious of what his life means, he will kill himself or someone else. In the apartment he encounters a rat, also trapped, and explodes. “Bigger took a shoe and pounded the rat’s head, crushing it, cursing hysterically: ‘You sonofabitch!’”
Later Bigger does kill two persons—a young white woman without meaning to, his girlfriend Bessie meaning to. His criminality liberates him: “He had murdered and had created a new life for himself. It was something that was all his own, and it was the first time in his life he had had anything that others could not take from him.” Filled with elation, he is transformed from a victim of his environment into an existential actor: “Never had he had the chance to live out the consequences of his actions; never had his will been so free as in this night and day of fear and murder and flight.” When Boris Max, his communist lawyer, a kindly white whom Bigger trusts, offers the judge an impassioned plea that Bigger’s crimes are the result of circumstances, that “we must deal here with a dislocation of life involving millions of people,” Bigger resists this view of him. Max’s argument robs him of his freedom, his individuality. And so when Bigger, in his cell—his final cage—hours away from execution and longing more than ever to talk with Max, insists passionately upon his responsibility, Max’s eyes fill with terror as he gropes for his hat “like a blind man,” uncomprehending that for Bigger:
“What I killed for, I am! … What I killed for must’ve been good! … I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.”
The creator of Native Son’s Bigger Thomas, Richard Wright, had grown up in the South and then in Chicago, “ringed by walls,” as he later put it. “Tension would set in at the mere mention of whites,” he remembered. “It was as though I was continuously reacting to the threat of some natural force whose hostile behavior could not be predicted,” as though he had been the “victim of a thousand lynchings.” But, unlike Studs and Bigger, he found a way out—reading. Resorting to a ruse to borrow books from a whites-only library, he began with Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces. It startled him. “What was this?” he wondered. “Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words.” Then perhaps he too could use words as weapons. But he could not wholly break out of his own cage. By the late 1930s, Daniel Aaron speculated, Wright was leading a double intellectual life: the black Marxist who sought to bring “scattered but kindred peoples into a whole” and the private man, the novelist who idealized the isolated, existential individual.
Many of the authors and artists of the 1930s were trying to bring scattered but kindred peoples together, striving to release them from their separate cages and to raise them to an individual and collective consciousness they had never known, hoping to complete the task of psychological and political mobilization that the New Dealers had started but not finished. It was altogether fitting that one of their most articulate creations was a man who never said a word, never even appeared in a book or on a stage. By 1935 the Group, an experiment in collective theater, had scored some striking successes by importing the Stanislavsky method, which taught actors to inhabit their characters, and by insisting that “the blood and bones of a living stage must be the blood and bones of the actuality around us.” In January 1935, amid many doubts, the Group put on Waiting for Lefty by a rather untried playwright, Clifford Odets.
A somewhat simplistic play, like all agitprop, about a taxi strike, Waiting for Lefty dramatized a drivers’ meeting, with the entire theater serving as a union hall and the audience as union members. As the tension and oratory mounted, the first-night audience took on the call for “STRIKE!” with such fervor that the actors stood frozen on the stage, gaping at the cheering, stamping mass. “STRIKE! STRIKE!” But strike for what? Against what? The audience did not seem to know or care. Liberated, it felt unencumbered by the need to act or even choose. How had Odets achieved this magic that night after night brought suburban matrons and Wall Street tycoons to stamp their feet and shake their fists?
In part by never producing Lefty. For Lefty was dead.