American Experiment (305 page)

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.”