Forgotten Man, The (35 page)

In June, the
New York Times
announced that the TVA would have a distinguished summer worker—John Roosevelt, the president’s son and a freshman at Harvard, who was enlisting as a volunteer to chop and heave along with other TVA workers. The younger Roosevelt, it was promised, “would displace no” laborer. On July 4—to underscore that the TVA was a patriotic project—Lilienthal staged a rally of 30,000, some 7,000 more than Coughlin had drawn, for “TVA appreciation day” in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Two governors were there to survey the majestic train of fifty-seven floats, and the president sent a message to be read aloud.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt was preparing his pen to sign Bob Wagner’s labor legislation. The act gave workers the same right to organize and to bargain collectively that Roosevelt had hoped to secure through the NRA. In the spirit of other 1935 legislation, the Wagner Act included an economic justification: labor had not been sufficiently organized heretofore, and that itself had caused downturns. The inequality of bargaining power between employees and employers, the act said, tended to “aggravate recurrent business depressions.” Ignoring the importance of productivity, the economics of the law were lopsided.

Under Wagner Act rules, a union, once in place at a company,
might keep out workers who did not join—the so-called closed shop. The same union need not ever again be subject to election by ratification but could represent the workers more or less in perpetuity. The effect was the most coercive of any law passed in the New Deal. Roosevelt had second thoughts about it. Especially disturbing was the act’s clear warning that refusals by employers to allow workers to organize “lead to strikes and other forms of industrial strife.” The suggestion was that employers who did not interpret the new law generously could expect to pay for that with strife—violence—and might even be subject to such violence as a result of pre–Wagner Act refusals. Again, Lilienthal acted with alacrity: he began readying a statement noting that 17,000 TVA workers were entitled to rights and collective bargaining under the new Wagner Act.

The Wagner Act contained news enough for a year. But there was also the Social Security Act, Perkins’s and Douglas’s plan to provide pensions for senior citizens. Here lawmakers had given Perkins, in particular, a hard time. Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma—a Democrat, though no relation to the Gores of Tennessee—had been blind since childhood. Though presumably precisely the sort of person whom acts like Social Security might protect, Gore was sarcastic. “Isn’t this socialism?” Why no, Secretary Perkins replied. “Isn’t this just a teeny weeny bit of socialism?”

Now Champ Clark staved everyone off, blocking agreement on the legislation through the heat of July. Roosevelt, however, did not relent, and finally he prevailed: the Social Security Act would be voted on without Clark’s amendment, which had supplied the private companies with an opt-out. There was a promise to study Clark’s concept for consideration in later legislation, but the chance to continue a form of American pension that would show workers there was an alternative to the government provision was fading.

The motion cameras were ready when Roosevelt entered the Cabinet Room on a mid-August Wednesday. Perkins was there, along with Bob Wagner and Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania—the Guffey who had replaced Mellon’s old ally. There were no newspapermen and the print reporters, humbled, had to ask photographers for
details for their story. The participants pulled close to the table and signed what was to be the most famous legislation of Roosevelt’s presidency: the Social Security Act. “The civilization of the past hundred years with its startling industrial changes has tended more and more to make life insecure,” Roosevelt said in a statement. Now, with this pension bill for older citizens, that insecurity would be reduced. Government would begin to provide “a law to flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and inflation—a law that will take care of human needs.” Roosevelt used different pens for different parts of his signature, so that a number of those present—especially Perkins—would have a keepsake from that day.

Social Security seemed a gift on a scale most Americans would never have expected a president to be able to offer. At a time of—still—so much need, the idea of help seemed in itself a blessing. Even though the first Social Security payment, check number 00-000-001, would not be issued until 1940, people knew that the money was coming.

To many of the progressives the news that their ideas were finally becoming law was intensely gratifying. Roosevelt hoped the program would make older workers comfortable with the idea of retiring earlier, leaving more work for younger people. Perkins and the progressives liked the unemployment insurance as much as the senior citizen pensions. Paul Douglas would head for Italy that fall of 1935—he had a new wife, the daughter of the sculptor Lorado Taft. From Siena, he wrote: “One who for fifteen years has worked for such legislation may perhaps derive a pardonable sense of satisfaction in the fact that the American public has finally realized that it needs the greater protection against unemployment and old age which pooled insurance gives.”

That same August, the TVA had more good news: in the first fifteen days of the month the directors had hosted 30,000 tourists, there to inspect the rising Norris Dam. The dam was 253 feet—like a seventeen-story building. And at the end of August, on the twenty-sixth, Roosevelt made the utilities’ nightmare into law: he signed the utilities act. The language of the death sentence was softened, but it
was still dire. Holding companies had to limit themselves,
Time
explained, to a “single integrated system, and” multilevel companies must be reconfigured. The law still restricted private companies in a way that gave significant new advantage to the TVA. On the last day of August, Roosevelt also signed into law his new tax bill, increasing the top tax to 79 percent, increasing estate taxes, and lowering tax-rate thresholds so that more families would pay higher taxes. As if the new holding company act were not enough punishment, the tax bill included a graduated corporation tax—to punish big business—and a dividend tax designed to weigh down holding companies. The summer was ending, but Roosevelt told himself he had reduced, for the moment, the chance of losing constituents on the left.

In September, news brought further confirmation of that assessment. An assassin felled Huey Long, perhaps the greatest single political threat to Roosevelt’s political coalition. Roosevelt now made a promise to a prominent journalist of what he called a breathing spell—a ceasefire—in his war against business. Stocks, which had been rising, promptly marched up some more. But a breathing spell indeed was all it was. The class war was far from over.

Tugwell, perhaps watching Lilienthal, now sought to dramatize his successes. On the last day of June he and Eleanor Roosevelt had hosted a conference on the future of housing and resettlement at Buck Hill Falls, Pennsylvania. Stuart Chase had attended. There they had talked about the importance of government’s role in developing communities for migrants and others: “A community does not consist of houses alone,” said Tugwell. “You cannot just build houses and tell people to go and live in them. They must be taught how to live,” Mrs. Roosevelt echoed. Mrs. Roosevelt liked Tugwell because he said what other reformers only thought; “My hat is always off to your courage,” she wrote when he got in one of his tangles.

Determined to publicize his work further, Tugwell thought of his old friend Roy Stryker, one of the coauthors of his economics textbook back in the 1920s. Through photos and drawings, Tugwell believed, that textbook had triggered more thought than any words-
alone text could have. More recently Stryker had suggested to Tugwell that they do a “picture” book together.

Now Tugwell had an idea. He had seen the modern murals that Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury had commissioned across the country—so many that, that year, a newspaper critic would note in wonder that the New Deal had functioned “more lavishly as an art patron than all the previous administrations lumped together.” Could not he also convince minds through art? Tugwell asked Stryker to work at the Resettlement Administration, to gather evidence that made the RA’s cause and work understandable to the public. Stryker had a good eye and began putting together a staff of photographers—then near-unknowns named Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Lange. Some were already working for government; others were new.

When Stryker started out, he had trouble conceiving exactly what sort of pictures to commission. Tugwell coached him: “One day he brought me into his office and said to me ‘Roy, a man may have holes in his shoes, and you may see the holes when you take the picture. But maybe your sense of the human being will teach you there’s a lot more to that man than the holes in his shoes, and you ought to try to get that idea across.’”

If he could picture these forgotten men, Tugwell reckoned, the programs undertaken in their name would be allowed to continue. Indeed his whole department counted on that: the RA, Stryker later remembered, “simply could not afford to hammer home anything except their message that federal money was desperately needed for major relief programs. Most of what the photographers had to do to stay on the payroll was routine stuff to show what a good job the agencies were doing out in the field.” Stryker channeled Tugwell’s faith that agriculture was crucial to the future of the country, and would ask for a photo from Kansas sending the message that “there is nothing in the world that matters very much but wheat.”

As summer 1935 moved into fall, organized labor meanwhile took in the meaning of its legislative victory. The most excited—
logically enough—was John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. He realized that with a single blow, Roosevelt had created one of the greatest power blocs ever to appear on the American stage—and one that he, rather than the American Federation of Labor’s Will Green, might lead. The moderate old AFL was not the right union for the wage worker. To allow Green to lead was to squander advantage.

On September 1, Lewis staged a giant outdoor meeting in Fairmont, West Virginia, with forty thousand coal miners and their families. The event celebrated not only the Wagner Act but also the just-signed Guffey Coal Act, which created a National Recovery Administration for coal mining. Lewis predicted Roosevelt’s reelection—a year early—and announced happily that “the era of privilege and predatory individuals is over.” The next month in Atlantic City, at the convention of the American Federation of Labor, Lewis walked along the boardwalk and, during a rain shower, ran into a union acquaintance. The acquaintance asked him whether he had been thinking of his old dream of a new kind of industrial unionism. “I have been thinking of nothing else for a year,” Lewis replied, grabbing the friend’s forearm. The same week, at the convention, the majority rejected a proposal led by Lewis to authorize a campaign to organize industrial workers, and Lewis decided to lead the workers out into a new institution, the Committee for Industrial Organization. It was time to part with the Will Greens and the Matthew Wolls.

Lewis was a theatrical man of the tough variety. To make the breakup more vivid, he provoked a quarrel with the president of the conservative Carpenters’ Union. The men began to shout, and Lewis walked over and punched the fellow in the nose. The man collapsed, and all eyes followed as Lewis left the hall, a symbol of the strength of the new more aggressive industrial unionism. The CIO was launched. The morning after the AFL convention adjourned, UMW leaders and others met for breakfast to plan. Among the planners was John Brophy, now working as Lewis’s arm at the UMW.

On the last day of September, Roosevelt traveled out to Hoover’s dam, now called the Boulder Dam. The project was finally—and
splendidly—ready for dedication. Roosevelt noted that the dam’s construction created jobs for 4,000 men in hard-up years. Government had turned “unpeopled, forbidding desert” into something useful; the power generated here would increase the welfare of all, for, as he put it, “use begets use.” Hoover retaliated with a nasty speech in Oakland, California, before western Republicans a few days later, charging that Roosevelt was “joyriding to bankruptcy.” He also noted, accurately, that the Roosevelt administration had not brought unemployment back to anything near precrash levels. There had been make-work, such as the PWA or the WPA, but only 700,000 jobs had been created since 1932, leaving unemployment at one in five men. Hoover’s points were valid, but what came through was the stridency. He spoke past the end of the appointed hour, forcing the embarrassed radio network, the National Broadcasting Company, to switch him off before he finished.

In October, the WPA announced it would employ 26,000 idle artists, musicians, and actors—20,000 by November. At her theater, Hallie Flanagan would shortly produce
Triple A Plowed Under,
a play about the problems and courage of the farmer under the New Deal. As at the TVA or at Tugwell’s RA, responsibility within the WPA for supplying the jobs and overseeing the programs would be assigned regionally. The head of the program for New York City—the theater center—was to be Elmer Rice, a well-known and left-leaning playwright. The signal was clear: WPA product in the coming year would not necessarily be all pro-Roosevelt, but it certainly would be anti-Republican.

By November, the new CIO had opened an office in Washington. Its goal was “to foster recognition and acceptance of collective bargaining” in mass production industries. Lewis named John Brophy to head the office. The dreamer who had placed the last question to Stalin in Moscow had completed his transformation: he was now a lobbyist on K Street.

At the Supreme Court, the justices began to contemplate what they would do when the Wagner Act came before them, or if Roosevelt won a second term. After paying a call on FDR in November,
Justice Ben Cardozo wrote to Felix Frankfurter of the president, “He seemed strong and happy. To have a picture of him talking with McReynolds would be precious.” Frankfurter carried this bit of humor to the President like a gift. In a Thanksgiving note to Roosevelt, he wrote: “Can we not have such a photograph!? It would be a superb campaign poster—or might McReynolds enjoin you from exhibiting it!”