American Experiment (293 page)

Next month a late vote came in from Britain. “The courage, the power
and the scale” of Roosevelt’s effort, wrote Winston Churchill, “must enlist the ardent sympathy of every country, and his success could not fail to lift the whole world forward into the sunlight of an easier and more genial age.” The British Conservative was seeking to place Roosevelt in the broadest sweep of history.

“Roosevelt is an explorer who has embarked on a voyage as uncertain as that of Columbus, and upon a quest which might conceivably be as important as the discovery of the New World.”

T
HE WINTER OF 1934
was the hardest time of all, the young factory worker said. At one point the family ate only potatoes and dog meat. “We sold everything we could except the piano. Mama wouldn’t let that go.… All of us had taken our music lessons on it—especially my sister, the one who died when I was little. I guess that was the real reason Mama wouldn’t let it go.”

In Macon County, Georgia, the NRA meant to many blacks “Negro Removal Act” or “Negro Rarely Allowed,” and to some whites “Negro Relief Act” or “No Roosevelt Again.”

In a country town outside Boston a decorous bridge party ended up in merriment and highjinks, with the ladies scissoring off their partners’ long neckties just below the knot. “I hope that wasn’t your best tie, Charles,” the hostess joked. Charles was an MIT graduate now ekeing out a living from a chicken farm. “My dear,” he said with a tight smile, “it was my only one.”

“Close to me four children moved up and down the row with nimble fingers” picking currants, a jobless writer related. “The parents scolded or cajoled as the hot day wore on and the kids whined or sulked under the monotonous work. Their ages ranged from six to twelve or thirteen.” Two younger girls tended a baby on a blanket under a tree. “For one day’s work of nearly ten hours the father collected for himself, his wife, and four children $2.44.”

From Florida a Du Pont in-law and vice president indignantly wrote a friend: “A cook on my houseboat at Fort Myers quit because the government was paying him a dollar an hour as a painter.”

An Indiana housewife wrote to the local newspaper about living on $1.50 a week. “Those in charge of relief have never known actual hunger and want.… Just what does our government expect us to do when our rent is due? When we need a doctor? …It is always the people with full stomachs who tell us poor people to keep happy.”

J. P. Morgan’s family often warned visitors not to mention Roosevelt’s name to the old man—it might raise his blood pressure to dangerous
heights. It was not safe to mention
any
Roosevelt. When someone had let fall the name of Theodore Roosevelt, Morgan had burst out, “God damn all Roosevelts!”

In Garden City, Kansas, the skies blackened as whirlwinds of black dust beat on the farmhouses. “The doors and windows were all shut tightly, yet those tiny particles seemed to seep through the very walls. It got into cupboards and clothes closets; our faces were as dirty as if we had rolled in the dirt; our hair was gray and stiff and we ground dirt between our teeth.”

A community sing in a migratory labor camp in California hymned an old sharecropper’s lament:

Eleven Cent cotton and forty cent meat

How in the world can a poor man eat?

Flour up high, cotton down low,

How in the world can you raise the dough?

Clothes worn out, shoes run down,

Old slouch hat with a hole in the crown.…

These were the voices of some Americans not during the Hoover depression but a year or two after Roosevelt’s Hundred Days. Overall, the statistics looked good. New private and public construction put in place rose from $2.9 billion in 1933 to $3.7 billion in 1934 and $4.2 billion in 1935. Average weekly earnings of production workers went up from $16.65 in 1933 to $18.20 the next year and $19.91 the year after that. Unemployment fell in these same years from 12.8 million to 11.3 to 10.6. But these improvements looked almost pathetic compared with the 1929 figures—only 1.5 million jobless that year, weekly paychecks of almost $25 for factory workers, nearly $11billion in construction. As usual, women did worse than men and improved their lot more slowly. Roosevelt’s central goal and promise—recovery—had been only fractionally accomplished.

Yet the smell and feel of a strong recovery lasted for at least a year after the Hundred Days. Roosevelt’s exuberance, experimentation, concern— above all, the sheer range and variety of his activism—symbolized a nation on the march, looking forward. And there had been so much change and progress in so many areas: NRA had begun to bring some order and equity to what had been pure jungle conflict; depositors’ savings were safe; millions of the poor were receiving relief jobs or at least relief; magnificent projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority had been launched; the government was policing—or at least monitoring—Wall Street; farm income had been boosted and stabilized; new conservation programs were
underway; the sight of the dispossessed family huddling outside its ancestral home while the slick-talking auctioneer sold it off was far less common across the great agricultural regions of the nation.

Yet millions of people were still in dire want—all the more so because promises from Washington and state capitals had sharpened their hopes and appetites. The President was now caught up in one of the most dynamic and compelling transformational situations that a free people can experience. Not only did the basic wants exist in harrowing abundance; they had been acknowledged and legitimated by the New Dealers to the point that now they had become publicly recognized needs. As political leaders made more promises, offered more assurances, aroused more hope, these needs were converted into popular expectations that were addressed back to the leaders—any leaders. And as leaders sought followers, as politicians competed for votes, popular expectations changed into feelings of entitlement and in turn into demands by followers on leaders. Who then would become the true leaders?

“In the summer of 1933, a nice old gentleman wearing a silk hat fell off the end of a pier. He was unable to swim. A friend ran down the pier, dived overboard and pulled him out: but the silk hat floated off with the tide. After the old gentleman had been revived, he was effusive in his thanks. He praised his friend for saving his life. Today, three years later, the old gentleman is berating his friend because the silk hat was lost.”

Roosevelt was a bit disingenuous in telling this story. Having watched the counterattack of leaders of finance on both Cousin Ted’s and Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism, he could hardly have been astonished that capitalists would turn against the New Deal. Still, he was genuinely perplexed as to why the right-wing counterattack came so quickly, and in such angry and often ugly form. As the master conductor of the concert of interests, had he not responded to business needs—in his stern call for economy, his refusal to support left-wing proposals such as the socialization of banking, his early insistence on self-liquidating public works, his initial coolness even to federal guarantee of bank deposits, his defiance of the American Legion on veterans’ pensions? Had he not received praise from such diverse conservatives as Henry L. Stimson, Walter Lippmann, and Hamilton Fish, such conservative newspapers as
The Wall Street Journal
and the Hearst chain? Had not the NRA and other measures tried to be evenhanded between capital and labor?

Many on the right were not placated by these measures, and their fury
rose in the months after the Hundred Days. In his speeches and posture, if not always in his policies, Roosevelt was challenging some of the fundamental values of the old American right—its definition of liberty as freedom from governmental regulation and control, its belief in individualism in contrast to the “collectivist” NRA and AAA, its attachment to laissez faire and limited government in contrast to the leviathan that Roosevelt seemed to be erecting, its championship of thrift in public spending, its reverence for the Constitution and the checks and balances designed to frustrate popular majorities seeking to control the presidency and Congress. Some of the more venerable spokesmen for American conservatism in the 1930s had sat in Yale and other classrooms when Spencerian Social Darwinism—above all, the belief that progress emerges out of competition and the struggle for survival—had been relayed by the likes of William Graham Sumner and other eminent teachers.

It was inevitable that these powerful men would come into conflict with the President unless he hewed to a conservative line—and Roosevelt the improviser and experimenter would hew to no ideology during the early New Deal. Rumblings on the right began to be heard by late 1933. An organized counterattack on the New Deal was developing strongly by mid-1934, at a time when protest on the left—aside from socialists and communists who had been against the Administration from the start as a matter of course—was still mixed and unfocused. And leadership of the right was taken initially not by conservative Republicans or big businessmen but by Democrats.

The most notable of these Democrats was the party’s hero of the 1920s, Al Smith, who had now become the unhappiest warrior of them all. His desertion of the “collectivist” New Deal signaled a poignant effort of the old business leadership of the Bourbon Democracy, now aided by disaffected urbanites, to hold the Democratic party to its earlier “Jeffersonian” ways. John J. Raskob, a close friend of Smith’s, had retired from active directorship of General Motors in 1928 to head up both the Democratic-National Committee and the Smith campaign. After Smith’s defeat Raskob and Jouett Shouse, a Kansas newspaper editor and politico, ran the party. Roosevelt’s vanquishing of Smith at the 1932 Democratic convention left both Raskob and Shouse in political eclipse. By early 1934 a Du Pont vice president was corresponding with Raskob about Roosevelt’s seeking to set labor against capital, buying votes from the poor, attacking corporate wealth, and other transgressions. Why not, Raskob asked the Du Pont man, set up an organization to combat the idea that businessmen were crooks and similar iniquitous notions?

From these seeds there rapidly grew a unique organization, the
American Liberty League. Top men in General Motors, Du Pont, and other corporations took the lead with Raskob and Shouse in setting it up, sometimes meeting with Smith in his office at the Empire State Building. Most of the participants by now were Republicans, but the group secured as members of its board of directors not only Smith but the 1924 Democratic presidential nominee, John W. Davis. Heavily financed by Du Pont and other big corporations, the League by the end of summer 1934 was ready to go into action as the anti-New Deal voice of business.

Shouse first paid a courtesy call on the President in mid-August to assure him of the League’s “absolutely non-partisan character.” Roosevelt could not have been more agreeable. After hearing out Shouse’s list of objectives—chiefly the protection of enterprise and of property—the President said airily, “I can subscribe to that one hundred per cent.” He might use League people to help him prepare the next federal budget, he volunteered, and he even called in his press secretary in Shouse’s presence and instructed him to announce the President’s endorsement of the League when it went public.

As usual, Roosevelt bided his time. Late in August he told reporters amiably that Shouse had stopped by and had pulled out of his pocket a couple of “Commandments”—the need to protect property and to safeguard profits. What about other commandments? he had asked Shouse. The League said nothing about teaching respect for the rights of individuals against those who would exploit them, or the duty of government to find jobs for all those who wished to work. The President quoted a gentleman “with a rather ribald sense of humor” as saying that the League believed in two things—love God and then forget your neighbor.

Had Shouse asked him to join? a reporter asked. “I don’t think he did,” Roosevelt said with a grin. “Must have been an oversight.”

With this press-conference baiting of the League, the war was on between Roosevelt and the right. Conservative pamphlets had the New Deal putting the nation on the brink of chaos, destroying states’ rights, plunging the country into bankruptcy, leading the people into socialism, dictatorship, and tyranny. The New Deal was communist or fascist, or perhaps both. Roosevelt must have been puzzled by a question that has eluded historians for at least half a century: why such emotional intensity? Surely not because of economic deprivation; business was enjoying a moderate boom under the early New Deal. Surely not wholly because of loss of power; Roosevelt had given business leaders a voice and some influence in policy-making, albeit only as a junior partner.

Perhaps the most likely explanation is a psychological one. The vehemence of the right-wing counterattack can be seen as deriving chiefly from
acute feelings of insecurity and lowered status in the business community. Roosevelt had robbed capitalists of something even more important than some of their money and their power. He had threatened their self-esteem. The men who had been the economic lords of creation now inhabited a world where political leaders were masters of headlines and recipients of deference, even adulation. Men who had claimed for themselves Righteousness and Civic Virtue, even during the Hoover depression years, now found themselves whipping boys for vote-cadging politicians—or even in the dock. Roosevelt, said a French observer, had exploded one of the most popular of American myths—he had dissociated the concept of wealth from the concept of virtue.

And Roosevelt’s own psychology? His pride and self-esteem were also at stake. He was sensitive to criticism from the right, especially from people of his own class. He wrote a Harvard classmate, a Boston banker, that he had heard of some remarks the classmate had made, and “because of what I felt to be a very old and real friendship these remarks hurt.” He wrote another friend bitterly about the “dinner-party conversations in some of the best houses in Newport.” Doubtless he felt demeaned and deserted by the same types of people who had stood apart from him in his school and college years. It was often charged, Richard Hofstadter noted, that Roosevelt was betraying his class, “but if by his class one means the whole policy-making, power-wielding stratum, it would be just as true to say that his class betrayed him.” And the President was still acting and sounding far more like a Groton gentleman than were many of his erstwhile schoolmates.