Forgotten Man, The (50 page)

Washington too was giving up its fantasy. Within a few years, by 1943, lawmakers would make their impatience with Tugwell’s experiment explicit. They would bar the Farm Security Administration from using any appropriated funds for resettlement projects—unless that cash was used to speed liquidation of such farms. Myer Cohen, assistant regional director at the FSA, moved on. He would take up work as administrator of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, helping war casualties in Europe. Though the farm would, in the good harvest year of 1942, offer $4 a day to workers who used to get less than $2, many of those migrants would not take work even at that price; as
Time
magazine would report, they could get $1.12 an hour building internment camps for Japanese Americans. Casa Grande was becoming history.

Over the fall, the Republicans began to realize their error. Willkie had wagered correctly indeed—it was true that the candidate who seemed to know best about the war would win. But Roosevelt had found the biggest flaw in his wager: it was easy for Roosevelt to supplant Willkie as that candidate. Roosevelt had more credentials. Willkie may have served as an officer, but Roosevelt had personally managed the navy as assistant secretary for seven years. He had led the country through the domestic war of the Depression. What the Depression had been to the Roosevelt candidacy in 1932, the war was to the Roosevelt candidacy of 1940: the single best argument to reelect Roosevelt and give him special powers. Even
Time
of the Luce empire, the very empire that had advanced Willkie, understood. That year
Time
’s editors had written, “Whether Mr. Roosevelt is Moses or Lucifer, he is a leader.”

All these facts Roosevelt, a more experienced campaigner than Willkie, understood. But there was one additional, and very powerful, bonus for Roosevelt. Willkie was basing his campaign on the ten
million unemployed whom he would cite all year as evidence of Roosevelt’s failures. Though unemployment was heading down now, it was still over one in ten. A war, however, would hand to Roosevelt the thing he had always lacked—a chance, quite literally, to provide jobs to the remaining unemployed. On the junket down the Potomac, for example, he could count 6,000 men at work at Langley Field; 12,000 men at Portsmouth Navy Yard, where there had been 7,600; and new employment in the military or the prospects of it, for Americans elsewhere. Roosevelt hadn’t known what to do with the extra people in 1938, but now he did: he could make them soldiers.

GOP leaders fought back. But as leaders and oppositions since have discovered, war trumps everything—economics as well as politics. The TVA, for example, could not be the target it had found itself in the 1930s, for now it was generating power for the war effort. By July 9, a subcommittee in the House of Representatives had already approved an extra $25 million infusion to the TVA budget so that the TVA might partner with—of all concerns—Mellon’s own old firm, Aluminum Company of America. Past enmities were to be forgotten in the name of the production of aluminum sheeting, vital for such things as airplanes. By the end of the month Roosevelt was signing $68 million in cash for the TVA, “essential to the national defense.” This was well over the original appropriation for the whole TVA project and double the amount in Roosevelt’s original plan for construction of the Norris Dam at Cove Creek. Lilienthal held a cheery press conference in Washington—as it happened, two doors down from the Washington for Willkie headquarters—affirming forcefully that “no TVA director” or employee would participate in the election. But then, none would now need to.

All this made matters harder for the necessarily partisan Willkie. General Hugh Johnson, Roosevelt’s old NRA head, was especially unhappy at the thought of the United States heading to Europe, an event that would certainly lead Congress to giving Roosevelt new powers. Johnson later told a radio audience that Roosevelt would give up the emergency powers “as willingly as a hungry tiger gives up
red meat.” As election night drew near, the nation was tenser than it had been in many preceding elections. The
New York Times
announced plans to flash results from its tower in Times Square—when the beam swept north, it meant Roosevelt was leading. A beam sweeping south would signal that the lead was Willkie’s. A steady beam to the south made Willkie the winner. A steady beam to the north was a Roosevelt victory.

At the end, the beam shone steadily north. The Republicans were bitter, for they concluded, accurately enough, that the outcome would sideline not only their party but their record of accuracy when it came to the economy. They had been right so often in the 1930s and they would not get credit for it. The great error of their isolationism was what stood out. And their bitterness made them look small.

But Wilkie had polled 22 million votes, more than any Republican in history, even more than Hoover in 1928. Even discounting for the population increase, it was an impressive showing. Willkie recognized that the political news was that he had come as far as he had. “I accept the result of the election with complete good will,” he told the press at the Hotel Commodore’s Parlor A. The New Deal had clearly changed the country forever. Now the government would always be there on the national stage. But the election of 1940 showed that the less-governed America of Coolidge and Mellon—or Father Divine, Joseph Schechter, and Bill W.—was still strong.

Back in Elwood, Willkie had reminded the country of the original forgotten man, so obscured in recent years. That forgotten man—Summer’s man, the individual so beloved of the old liberals—was important too, and he had no political party. Then Willkie had posed a rheotrical question. Was the government with its support now the central thing about the country, the thing that “the forgotten man wanted us to remember”? It wasn’t. A government might help, when necessary, but a government was secondary, “not enough.”

“What that man wanted us to remember,” Willkie said, “was his chance—his right—to take part in our great American adventure.”
The country now seemed to remember again what it always knew: that the adventurer was the force who pushed the country forward. It was the adventurer’s America too that the soldiers would shortly be defending. And no one wanted to serve more than the Forgotten Man.

Roger Baldwin,
the ACLU cofounder, worked hard for the peace movement in the 1930s. His change of heart at the news of the Soviet-Nazi Pact changed the course of both the ACLU and American history. Baldwin now brought strong anti-Communists onto his board. In 1940 the ACLU expelled a board member, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who was a Communist; Baldwin concluded that “an organization devoted to civil liberties should be directed only by consistent supporters of civil liberty.” At the end of 1959, Baldwin told scholar Lewis Feuer, “We went wrong, we were starry-eyed. We didn’t see the potentiality of totalitarianism.” Some have called Baldwin’s anti-Communist shift early McCarthyism, but it gave the ACLU a legitimacy that would enable it to play an important role in civil rights battles after World War II.

Stuart Chase
went on to write in a number of other areas. His best-known book was titled
The Tyranny of Words,
and his work on semantics produced admiration from people of all political backgrounds. One observer wrote admiringly, “Mr. Chase’s logic wobbles, but his sentences march.” From the 1950s, he served on the planning commission of his town, Redding, Connecticut. In the 1960s he strongly
supported President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. In 1961 Chase traveled to the Soviet Union with the singer Marian Anderson, the publisher of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, William Benton, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and other intellectual and cultural figures to meet with Soviet citizens in the hopes of improving understanding between Moscow and Washington. Chase died in 1985, at age ninety-seven.

Despite his age—he was turning nearly fifty—
Paul Douglas
enlisted in the Marine Corps as a private during World War II. After the war, he was elected U.S. senator and became one of the first on the Hill to insist on racial integration of his staff. Douglas championed civil rights, and led the successful drive to protect the Indiana Dunes for recreation and the environment. He would later write that he had doubts about the U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union:

 

As one who must bear perhaps an infinitesimal share of responsibility for this decision, I have often wondered whether it was wise. Certainly recognition helped pave the way for Russia’s combining with Great Britain and the United States to defeat monolithic Nazism. But Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941 might have brought about the same result without any recognition.

But whether or not this decision was wise, I no longer believe in [Henry] Clay’s doctrine of always recognizing existent government…My disillusioning experience with Russian recognition was one of the factors that led me to oppose the recognition of Communist China and its admission into the United Nations.

 

(
John Brophy
also had doubts, writing in his autobiography of his time in Russia, “I had to reassess some impressions in the light of later events.”)

Father Divine
faded after World War II. In 1959 Krum Elbow was sold to a real estate developer.

Samuel Insull
never made it back to wealth despite his acquittal. He honored his debts as he could, selling or signing over to banks nearly
all his assets, right down to the swans from the lake at his country house and a Wedgwood dinner service of 205 pieces. He died of a heart attack in the Place de la Concorde stop of the Paris
métro
in the summer of 1938, less than a year after Mellon.

The War Relocation Authority hired
Dorothea Lange
to photograph the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. All told, Lange and WRA colleagues produced some 13,000 photographs of the camps created under Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. She and her husband, Paul Taylor, were horrified at what they saw and drafted letters from Roosevelt that sought to explain to the internees the justification for the action. Lange’s photos of the Japanese Americans were impounded and rarely seen, until recently.

David Lilienthal
became head of the TVA and was eventually nominated to head the Atomic Energy Commission. The TVA sold the town of Norris to a private investor for $2,107,500 in June 1948. Angry senators tried to establish that he had harbored Communists at the TVA during his confirmation hearings. Lilienthal offered a rebuttal that silenced them and helped bring about his confirmation. He published his own book about his concept of American civics,
This I Do Believe.
Eventually, Lilienthal went into the private sector, joining Lazard Freres on Wall Street and consulting for foreign governments. He and his wife, Helen, retired to Princeton.

Paul Mellon
would become as great a collector and donor as his father. At Yale, he created the Yale Center for British Art. He attended the dedication of the National Gallery in 1941. At the dedication, President Roosevelt said that the “giver of this building has matched the richness of its gift with the modesty of his spirit, stipulating that the gallery shall be known not by his name but by the nation’s.” The president noted that Abraham Lincoln, even in the middle of the Civil War and a national financial crisis, had pushed for an opulent Capitol dome. “Certain critics, for there were critics,” noted Roosevelt, “found much to criticize. There were new marble pillars…. But the president answered, ‘If the people
see the Capitol is going on, it is a sign that we intend this Union shall go on.’”

Mellon wrote later that the president’s remarks seemed to him “a little wry, considering the behavior of his tax bloodhounds,” but “perhaps he had come to realize that Father really had been a public-spirited man.” Andrew Mellon’s gift inspired others to join him, including the Kress family and Joseph Widener. During the war, the gallery remained open on Sunday evenings for “benefit of men in the armed forces and war workers in the city.”

Raymond Moley
worked in the public sector, seeking to help such groups as the Tax Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Moley published numerous books, including an enlightening portrait of politicians he had known,
Twenty-seven Masters of Politics.
He advised Herbert Hoover and supported the candidacy of several Republicans for president—Willkie, Barry Goldwater, and Richard Nixon. Moley died in 1975.

Walter Lyman Rice
became an attorney for Reynolds Metals Co., a company in the industry he had prosecuted during the New Deal. He also served as ambassador to Australia.

The
Schechters
went back into business after their Supreme Court victory, according to their descendant Glen Asner. In a note to the author, Asner wrote: “Their major political concern in the 1930s was anti-Semitism. They believed that if Roosevelt had not solved the problems of the Depression, the U.S. could have gone the way of Nazi Germany. Their overarching political concern was the condition of the Jews. That said, the main topics of discussion around the house were horses, stocks, and business.” Asner thinks it likely that the Schechters voted for Roosevelt all four times.

John Steinbeck
published his novel about Okies and the migrant camps in 1939. The
New York Times
commented that
The Grapes of Wrath
might read to some like “a disquisition by Stuart Chase.” The book became an American classic.

Roy Stryker
and the FSA offices produced 130,000 photographs. Upon leaving government, Stryker supervised a massive photo documentation project for Standard Oil of New Jersey.

William Graham Sumner
died in 1910.

After
Rex Tugwell
left government, many of his projects were completed, including Casa Grande, with mixed results. The Casa Grande settlement was sold off in the early 1940s. Later a student of Tugwell’s, Edward C. Banfield, published a monograph about Casa Grande’s failure,
Government Project.
Banfield went on to be a leading scholar in the urban studies field. Tugwell contributed a foreword to Banfield’s book, criticizing the settlers for their susceptibility to the anti–New Deal press. Of the settlement’s history, he concluded, “It is not a nice story.” Thoughtful as always, he also took some of the blame himself: “As I look back now after almost two decades it seems to me that we were doomed to failure from the start.” Of Casa Grande generally, he wrote: “We can see in it many lessons if we will.”

The story of a less ambitious planned community is told by Cathy Knepper in
Greenbelt, Maryland: A Living Legacy of the New Deal.
Greenbelt was in a different class from Casa Grande, for it never aimed for economic independence; rather, it was a cooperative suburb whose inhabitants traveled elsewhere to work. Still, both in the 1930s and 1940s, Greenbelt attracted the hostility of members of Congress; in the 1940s a select committee investigated the Farm Security Administration, which oversaw Greenbelt at the time, finding the agency “communistic.” In the period of McCarthyism a Greenbelt citizen, Abe Chasanow, became a target.

Tugwell became governor of Puerto Rico and, later, a professor at the University of Chicago. He and his second wife lived for a time in Greenbelt. They named one of their sons Franklin.

Wendell Willkie
joined a New York law firm, today still known as Willkie, Farr and Gallagher. He became Roosevelt’s emissary and traveled the world for the president during wartime. Roosevelt, in arranging a meeting concerning Lend Lease with the British prime
minister at Chequers, wrote to Churchill that Willkie was “truly helping to keep politics out over here.” Willkie was as susceptible to Stalin’s charm as Roosevelt, or the 1927 travelers. With the aid of Irita Van Doren, he published a book about a vision of the globe without war,
One World.
The Council on Books in Wartime called his book an “imperative” read.
One World
sold 1.6 million copies within a few months, making it one of the best-selling books in history. Twentieth Century Fox, of which Willkie was chairman of the board, bought the movie rights. Admiring the success, David Lilienthal wrote to Willkie seeking advice about publishing his own books.

Willkie also helped found Freedom House, a New York–based think tank, to fight for the advancement of democracy. He befriended the boxer Joe Louis, who had endorsed his candidacy in 1940. He represented an American Communist, William Schneiderman, before the Supreme Court, defending the man’s right to be a citizen. Willkie won the case for Schneiderman and assailed federal prosecutors for going after the Communist; the action, he said, set “an illiberal precedent.” He ran for president in 1944 but found little support.

Willkie died in 1944 of a heart attack, while his son Philip, a lieutenant in the navy, was still at sea. Sixty thousand people filed outside Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York on the day of his funeral.

Bill Wilson’s
Alcoholics Anonymous spread across the world. By 1975, there were 22,000 local groups in the United States and more abroad. In June 2005, the twenty-five millionth copy of
The Big Book
was published.