American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work (17 page)

These populist promises—of Long to make every man a king, of Coughlin to bring down men of greed, of Townsend to give every old person a comfortable pension—shimmered in the dreams of those hit hard by the depression. They were a mirage of salvation against the gray wastes of impoverishment, seeming to offer what Roosevelt, despite his efforts, had not been able to deliver.

And as the populists clamored for a leftward swing to spread the wealth, a recharged and newly vocal right campaigned to renew its old privileges and status. For some time, conservatives in business and politics had been itching to take up arms again. They hated the fact that they had been forced to tailor their business agendas to meet social needs, specifically through the National Recovery Administration codes that set working conditions, wages, and hours within industries and imposed production limits. Just as odious to them was the Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s version of economic planning, in which food distributors were taxed in order to pay farmers to limit their crop and livestock production. This was unacceptable meddling. The government had no right to control their property and income. It was the beginning of the end, the start of a long slide from centralized government and the dilution of states’ rights straight downhill to socialism. The more strident among them mixed their metaphors and compared Roosevelt to the most odious dictators in their roster, Hitler on the one hand and the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin on the other. In 1934 these feelings coalesced in an organization formed to defend what it called the constitutional “rights of persons and property.”

The group called itself the American Liberty League. Its roots had formed during Prohibition, in a business coalition that lobbied for the return of alcohol with the thought that if the government taxed beer and whiskey, it might then cut business taxes. When the states ratified the Twenty-first Amendment and ended Prohibition in December 1933, the group found a new cause—and a name—in anti–New Deal issues. Its chief movers were Alfred E. Sloan and William Knudsen of General Motors, the du Pont family and du Pont executives, conservative Democrats in Congress, Al Smith’s patron John Raskob, and, most loudly, Smith himself. For its president, the league tapped Jouett Shouse of Kentucky, who had resigned as head of the Democratic National Committee after the party nominated Roosevelt.

The Liberty League—the group was commonly referred to by this shorthand version of its name—announced its formation on August 22, 1934, and promised an “unremitting” fight against “government encroachments upon the rights of citizens.” Roosevelt and the New Deal now faced a well-financed and assertive voice joining the Republican National Committee on the right, while the populists harangued the administration from the other end of the spectrum. But for all of the sound and heat generated by both sides, neither addressed the ongoing toll of unemployment and the need for jobs to bring stability to the economy.

3. “THIS IS OUR HOUR”

T
he
New York Times
carried news of the Liberty League’s formation on its front page the next day, when a transatlantic liner nosed into a pier on the Hudson River and discharged its passengers. Among them were Harry Hopkins and his wife, Barbara, back from a fact-finding trip. Roosevelt had sent Hopkins off to gather information about public housing and social insurance schemes in England, Germany, Austria, and Italy, but the president had an ulterior motive. Hopkins had exhausted himself putting together the CWA and then dismantling it within five months. He had always worked without regard to his health, having twice contracted pneumonia in his days as a social worker, and the rich diet and cocktails of high living, together with his chain smoking and caffeine intake, did nothing to improve it.

“Incidentally,” Roosevelt had told him in a note in making the assignment, “in view of the steady grind you have had, I think that the sea trip will do you a lot of good.”

Hopkins and Barbara had sailed aboard the SS
Washington
on July 4, leaving their baby daughter, Diana, in the care of friends in Washington. By the time they returned on August 23, Hopkins had seen impressive low-income housing programs. He also had met Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, although Mussolini did not follow the agenda. “I had come to see him about public works and housing but when he learned I had just been to Berlin it was perfectly clear that he wished to talk of Germany. This quite suited me because it is the subject of all others that everyone in Europe is discussing,” Hopkins wrote on stationery of the American embassy in Rome. “I was not prepared for the contempt which he expressed of Hitler’s murders and his stupidity.” The murders to which he referred occurred in the blood purge that became known as the “Night of the Long Knives,” in which Hitler wiped out his enemies and consolidated his power. He had announced the purge—he said seventy-seven had died, most shot for treason, but the number was undoubtedly far higher—to the Reichstag on July 13, before Hopkins reached Rome. Hopkins also recorded, in vivid terms, his impressions of Mussolini: “[He] talks with his eyes and his hands—his eyes grow enormously big—they flash—roll in the most amazing fashion. His hands and arms move constantly…. He is an actor—and controls his emotions like stops onan organ. I fancy he could pretend great anger or pleasure with great effect.”

When he and Barbara returned to Washington after disembarking in New York, Hopkins reported to Roosevelt that he had been impressed with England’s public housing and income security schemes but believed such efforts in the United States would have to be done “in an American way.” That was in fact what the president intended. Ten weeks earlier, in June, he had formed the Committee on Economic Security and charged it with developing a plan for unemployment and old-age insurance. This was not, as might have been expected, a response to Dr. Townsend; he and his $200-a-month pension scheme were still largely unknown outside of California, and besides, Roosevelt had had a plan like this in mind from the beginning. Indeed, labor secretary Frances Perkins, who chaired the cabinet-level committee, had insisted that she be allowed to explore possibilities for creating an economic safety net before she agreed to come to Washington. More recently, unemployment compensation and old-age security bills had been introduced in Congress. But Roosevelt wanted to tackle these issues in a single piece of legislation, so he asked that action be put off until the committee had a chance to produce recommendations of its own. He set a deadline of December, which meant that the administration approached the midterm elections in November, now barely three months away, with no proposals of its own to counter the clamor on the left and right.

The populist crusaders, the angry business lords, the office seekers vying for seats in the next Congress were all scrambling for attention from voters and the press that fall, but crime, that old standby, stole the biggest headlines. After agents of the U.S. Bureau of Investigation gunned down bank robber John Dillinger outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago in July, the agency elevated Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd to iconic stature, naming him public enemy number one. By then Floyd had reputedly robbed thirty banks and killed at least ten men, including one law officer. But like the notorious Al Capone, now serving his federal tax evasion sentence at Alcatraz, he had become an anti-hero; Capone had his soup kitchen, and Floyd, who had grown up on a small farm in Oklahoma, was now called the “Sagebrush Robin Hood” for giving part of his robbery proceeds to the poor. Agents tracked Floyd to a farm outside East Liverpool, Ohio, where they shot him to death on October 22, barely two weeks before the election. Twenty thousand people, mourners and curiosity seekers, attended his funeral, but his reputation lived on in Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd the Gambler,” with lines such as:

Well, you say that I’m an outlaw, and you say that I’m a thief

Here’s a Christmas dinner for the families on relief.

On November 6, the administration took the headlines back, and with a vengeance. Conventional political wisdom says the party in power loses seats in midterm elections, but 1934 defied that wisdom. Democrats gained seats in both houses, and when the new Congress convened in January 1935, they would outnumber Republicans 69 to 25 in the Senate, and an astounding 322 to 103 in the House.

“He has been all but crowned by the people,” wrote William Allen White, a public sage whose widely respected Emporia, Kansas,
Gazette
was a reliable gauge of grassroots opinion. Arthur Krock of the
New York Times
called the voters’ endorsement of New Deal policies “the most overwhelming victory in the history of American politics.” William Randolph Hearst joined in, comparing Roosevelt’s popularity to past presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. For Hopkins and the others who wanted to see a new and expanded jobs program, it meant a chance to regain the momentum lost when the CWA was dismantled.

Hopkins was exultant. “Boys, this is our hour,” he told Aubrey Williams and other FERA colleagues one warm post-election November afternoon as they were driving to the racetrack at Laurel, Maryland. “We’ve got to get everything we want—a works program, social security, wages and hours, everything—now or never. Get your minds to work on developing a complete ticket to provide security for all the folks of this country up and down across the board.”

Back from the races, they went right to work. Laboring in the FERA offices in the Walker-Johnson Building and in the St. Regis Hotel three blocks north of the White House, Hopkins and his staff laid out a plan modeled on the CWA and drawn up with input from Harold Ickes, who wanted to be sure his Public Works Administration was not encroached upon. When it was ready, before Thanksgiving, Hopkins got on a train and headed for Georgia to show it to the president.

Roosevelt had been in Warm Springs for over a week; in the two years following his election, his visits to the spa’s therapeutic waters had given his cottage there the nickname the “Little White House.” The tile-lined baths and rehabilitation pools, rooms for physical therapy and treatment, and cottages and dining halls that constituted the Warm Springs complex were set amid low hills, and some of the goings-on there could be observed from the crest of a hill outside the property, so it was here that reporters stationed themselves to pick up hints of the president’s activities. Conservative Democrats, including Eugene Talmadge, had come calling during the first part of the week. The Georgia governor wanted his patronage back; he remained set against federal relief but wished to regain the control of relief appointments that he had lost when Hopkins federalized the Georgia program. With Hopkins’s arrival, reporters saw scenes of play and relaxation as the president and his advisors tossed a ball back and forth in one of the pools. The hard work going on elsewhere was less visible; the team worked in private discussing the organization and costs of the envisioned work relief program and refining Hopkins’s plan for its public debut.

Still, reports leaked out. A Thanksgiving Day story in the
New York Times
by Louis Stark put the program’s cost at $8 billion to $9 billion, a virtually unheard-of amount of money at the time. Delbert Clark of the
Times
called it Hopkins’s “End Poverty in America” plan. This was a reference to the failed gubernatorial campaign of novelist Upton Sinclair, whose 1934 End Poverty in California (EPIC) platform had shared a vision of utopia with Townsend. It had called for collectivizing land and factories so that jobless workers could grow their own food and make their own clothes. Hopkins’s plan, unlike Sinclair’s, was politically realistic, but its dimensions were vast enough to shock already roiled conservatives in advance of its formal announcement.

4. “WORK MUST BE FOUND…”

J
anuary 4, 1935, a Friday, was a cool, bright day in Washington, D.C. Elsewhere, the news absorbing readers and radio listeners included the trial in New Jersey of Bruno Hauptmann for the 1932 Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the French foreign minister’s appeasement of Mussolini’s Italian adventures in North Africa, the messy society divorce case of Snowden and Helen Fahnestock, and the third marriage of Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. A tennis promoter was dangling big checks in front of U.S. Open champions Fred Perry and Helen Jacobs to persuade them to turn pro, and in New York, a battle of basketball unbeatens loomed between Kentucky and New York University. But in Washington, as always, the first sport was politics, so all eyes were on the Capitol for Roosevelt’s annual message to the Congress.

A protester leaped from the crowd and screamed at the president as he was helped from his car outside the Capitol a little after noon: “Pass the bonus! We want prosperity!” It was a reminder of the depression’s unnerving persistence. Like prosperity, the bonus was an elusive goal, and the veterans had continued to press for it with each new Congress despite rebuffs from the White House.

Inside the Capitol, the galleries of the chamber of the House of Representatives were full, and lines had backed up outside the entrance doors. The president’s mother sat in the front row knitting something blue. The Senate marched in from its side of the Capitol, followed by the members of the Cabinet. Police stopped a man who looked suspiciously rustic amid the formal surroundings; he proved to be agriculture secretary Henry Wallace, and after producing identification he took his seat with the nine other secretaries. In the galleries and on the floor, the murmur of conversation filled the chamber as the packed house waited for the president.

The murmur rose to wild applause when Roosevelt was announced. He wore a frock coat and leaned on the arm of his son James as he made his slow way to the podium, illuminated by a massive bank of spotlights set up in the corners of the chamber to assist photographers and the giant movie newsreel cameras. He greeted Vice President Garner and the new House Speaker, Joseph W. Byrns of Tennessee, by their first names and then turned to the crowd and the microphones in front of him. His opening line contained, for the first time, the language by which the speech would be known from then on: “The Constitution wisely provides that the chief executive shall report to the Congress on the state of the union.”

Halfway into the six-page address, he began to talk about the need to put the nation back to work. He spoke of the effects that government handouts had on their recipients. Continued dependence on relief, he said, “induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers.”

The speech had both energy and moral urgency, and the crowd in the chamber belonged to Roosevelt. Three-quarters of the seats were taken up by Democrats. They spilled across the aisle and pushed the Republicans into an island of glum silence while they interrupted him repeatedly with applause and shouts of support. Even conservative Democrats, no fans of the New Deal, could count votes, and they had absorbed the lesson the CWA had taught them: jobs were popular.

“The federal government must and shall quit this business of relief,” Roosevelt declared, drawing an explosion of applause. The president waited until it ebbed, then took up his speech again: “I am not willing that the vitality of our people be further sapped by the giving of cash, of market baskets, of a few hours of weekly work cutting grass, raking leaves or picking up papers in the public parks. We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance and courage and determination.”

Five million jobless men and women occupied relief rolls, the president said. Of these, 1.5 million could not work, and responsibility for them would be thrown back onto state and local governments and private charities for a continuation of direct relief.

For the rest, he said, “it is a duty dictated by every intelligent consideration of national policy to ask you to make it possible for the United States to give employment to all of these three and one-half million employable people now on relief, pending their absorption in a rising tide of private employment.

“It is my thought that with the exception of certain of the normal public building operations of the Government, all emergency public works shall be united in a single new and greatly enlarged plan.”

The overriding criterion of the new and so far unnamed program, said the president, was that “all work undertaken should be useful—not just for a day, or a year, but useful in the sense that it affords permanent improvement in living conditions or that it creates future new wealth for the nation.”

He went on to say that payments for work should be larger than the dole, but small enough to make private employment preferable. Projects should not compete with private enterprise, and they should spend a high proportion of their cost in labor. They should be placed where the most workers on relief were located, and they should be capable of being wound down quickly in the event that private jobs became available. He listed among the types of jobs he had in mind slum clearance, rural housing and electrification, reforestation and erosion control, road improvement and construction, expansion of the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps, non-federal projects that would pay for themselves, “and many other projects which the nation needs and cannot afford to neglect.”

The president set no price tag on the program except to say the costs “will be within the sound credit of the government.” He ended the speech with an appeal to divine providence “for guidance and fostering care,” and made his way from the chamber through cascades of applause. That night, twelve House and Senate leaders attended one of Roosevelt’s indifferent suppers at the White House—neither the president nor Mrs. Roosevelt cared much about food, an attitude in keeping with the unremarkable cooking skills of the White House housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt—where after dining he told them he intended to ask for $4 billion for the works program. He soothed the impact by saying he did not actually expect to use that much since increasing private employment would allow the program to taper off.

Reaction the next day was generally positive, and even a bit surprised, given the exaggerated dreams churned up by the populist trumpeting of Townsend, Coughlin, and Long. Townsend’s appeal had spread beyond California by now; 3 million Americans were giving their monthly dimes to Townsend Clubs to lobby for his scheme of old-age pensions. Coughlin’s radio audience was larger than ever, drawn by his denunciations of wealth, excess profits, and “the exploitation of the laboring class” he was now calling for nationalization of utilities, banks, and natural resources such as oil and minerals. Long’s Share Our Wealth Society, announced the year before, had now grown to 27,000 chapters and claimed millions of members drawn to his proposals to “soak the rich” by breaking up “the swollen fortunes of America and to spread the wealth among the people.” He called for giving every family a $5,000 homestead and $2,500 a year. The popularity of these appeals led many to expect something more radical from Roosevelt, such as an extreme wealth redistribution program. They were surprised when he stayed close to the middle of the road.

The National Association of Manufacturers, the powerful business lobby that was usually suspicious of Roosevelt when not openly hostile to him, now focused favorably on his determination not to create jobs that would compete with private industry. The
Boston Herald
agreed, calling the plan “a little more rightish than leftish.” The
Los Angeles Times
said the same of the president’s determination to end the federal role in direct relief. Typically, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a statement favoring direct relief as less costly, and the Baltimore
Sun
thought that Roosevelt “would have done better to have provided for direct relief in conjunction with the States. The cost would have been less.” But even the Liberty League reserved judgment pending budget figures.

Only the
Washington Post
seemed to have a sense of the vastness of the program that the president had sketched. As the paper’s editorial page wrote, “There is no parallel in history for a successful effort by any government, perhaps excepting that of Soviet Russia, to create direct employment for an army of 3,500,000 people, as Mr. Roosevelt asks the Congress to make it possible to do.”