SIXTEEN

NEW DEAL ASCENDANT

No president … has had a sharper sense of personal power, a sense of what it is and where it comes from; none has had more hunger for it, few have had more use for it, and only one or two could match his faith in his own competence to use it.

—RICHARD E. NEUSTADT, PRESIDENTIAL POWER

UNDER FDR THE WHITE HOUSE, like the governor’s mansion in Albany, resembled the Grand Hotel. There were overnight accommodations for twenty-one, and there was never a vacancy. Franklin and Eleanor continued to move in separate circles. “The White House had two kinds of visitors,” Chief Usher J. B. West said. “There were the President’s people, and then there were Mrs. Roosevelt’s people.” According to West, the Roosevelts lived entirely apart. “We never saw Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt in the same room alone together.” When she met with him, which was not that often, “she always brought a sheaf of papers, a bundle of ideas. His secretary, Grace Tully, was usually there, or hers, Malvina Thompson.”¹

FDR’s schedule in the White House differed little from his routine in Albany. He awoke around eight and breakfasted in bed, usually scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice, and coffee. While eating he scanned the morning press: The New York Times and Herald Tribune, The Washington Post,the Baltimore Sun, and one of the McCormick-Patterson papers, either the Chicago Tribune or the Washington Herald. He also leafed through the clipping file prepared by Louis Howe—jokingly referred to as the Daily Bugle. With breakfast FDR lit his first cigarette of the two packs of Camels he smoked daily, always through a long-stemmed ivory cigarette holder. While eating, shaving, and dressing, he held a leisurely, freewheeling staff conference. Louis Howe and Missy LeHand were always there, Moley when he was not teaching in New York, and in the beginning Lewis Douglas, the former congressman from Arizona whom Roosevelt had named director of the budget. About ten they would be joined by Marvin McIntyre and Steve Early to review the day’s calendar.²

Roosevelt’s bedroom was on the second floor of the White House, next to the Oval Study, facing south, and like his bedrooms at Hyde Park and Warm Springs it was primitively furnished, cluttered with memorabilia, and austerely comfortable in the simple way that seemed to suit old money. Frances Perkins called it too large to be cozy but not large enough to be impressive.

I have a photographic impression of that room. A Victorian mantelpiece held a collection of miniature pigs. Snapshots of children were propped up in back of the pigs. There was an old bureau between the windows, with a plain white towel on top and things men need for their dressing arrangements. There was an old-fashioned rocking chair, often with a piece of clothing thrown over it. Then there was the bed—not the kind you expect a President of the United States to have. Roosevelt used a small, narrow white iron bedstead, the kind one sees in the boy’s room of many an American house. It had a thin, hard-looking mattress, a couple of pillows, and an ordinary white seersucker spread. An old grey sweater, much the worse for wear, lay close at hand. He wore it over night clothes to keep his shoulders warm. A white painted table, the kind one often sees in bathrooms, stood beside the bed, with a towel over it and with aspirin, nose drops, a glass of water, stubs of pencils, bits of paper, a couple of books, a worn old prayer book, a watch, a package of cigarettes, an ash tray, a couple of telephones, all cluttered together. And over the door at the opposite end of the room hung a horse’s tail. When asked what that was, he would say, “Why, that’s Gloster’s tail.”³

As in Albany, Roosevelt worked with an extended family—staff, servants, and even cabinet officers treated as old friends. Louis Howe lived in the White House, as did Missy and Eleanor’s reporter friend Lorena Hickok. So too did the Roosevelts’ daughter, Anna, and her two children, Sisty and Buzzy. Anna was separated from her husband, Curtis Dall, and would soon marry John Boettiger, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune whom she had met during the 1932 campaign. The elfin Howe was assigned the Lincoln Bedroom but before moving in insisted that President Lincoln’s nine-foot bed be replaced with something less imposing.⁴

At 10:30 Roosevelt was wheeled downstairs to the Oval Office in the west wing of the White House, where he remained until about six. His appointments were set at fifteen-minute intervals, but he often ran behind. He used the telephone frequently and often placed calls himself. Members of the cabinet, agency heads, congressional leaders, and several dozen others could phone him directly. He ate a light lunch at his desk, often joined by someone from the Hill, a visiting publisher or journalist or simply a person he wished to talk to, such as Henry Stimson or Ed Flynn when they were in town.⁵ Twice a week he met the press and on Thursday afternoon the cabinet. Unlike a parliamentary system or even earlier presidencies, FDR’s cabinet was not a decision-making body. “Our cabinet meetings are pleasant affairs,” Harold Ickes observed, “but we only skim the surface of routine affairs.”^* Between two and three Roosevelt handled his correspondence, dictating replies to either Missy or Grace Tully. The White House received upward of five thousand letters a day, and his staff had become expert at sorting out those items that required his attention. At six or so FDR would break off for a swim in the new White House pool (donated by New York City schoolchildren) and have a massage and perhaps a session with the White House physician, Navy admiral Ross T. McIntire.⁶ He liked nothing better than to play hooky and go for an occasional afternoon drive through Rock Creek Park or the surrounding countryside.

At seven, Roosevelt adjourned to the family quarters for the “children’s hour,” where he would play host to Louis and Missy, his military aide, Colonel Edwin “Pa” Watson, Grace Tully, and whoever else was on hand. Eleanor did not approve of FDR’s penchant for cocktail conviviality, never attended, and, as best one can tell, was never invited. With ice and glasses laid out in front of him, FDR merrily stirred classic martinis (heavy on the vermouth) or mixed old-fashioneds for his guests. “He mixed the ingredients with the deliberation of an alchemist,” his speechwriter Robert Sherwood recalled, “but with what appeared to be a certain lack of precision since he carried on a steady conversation while doing it.”^7*

For Mrs. Roosevelt, afternoon tea took the place of the “children’s hour.” Every day at five o’clock ER poured tea for friends and guests in her second-floor sitting room. She also hosted tea service for female reporters at her press conferences. Presiding over the tea table was for Eleanor, a teetotaler, the psychic equivalent of mixing martinis in the Oval Study at seven.

FDR took dinner at eight, often with his cocktail guests, in the Oval Study. Formal dinners were held in the State Dining Room on the first floor. Unless it was a formal occasion, FDR did not change for dinner. Eleanor had dinner in the Private Dining Room on the first floor with a separate guest list. The men wore black tie. The Hoovers had dressed formally every night and always ate in the State Dining Room, even when they dined alone. President Hoover and his wife enjoyed eating well, and during the Hoover administration the White House fare was excellent. Under the Roosevelts, it was dreadful. Ernest Hemingway, a confirmed trencherman, called the White House food “the worst I’ve ever eaten. We had rainwater soup followed by rubber squab, a nice wilted salad and a cake some admirer had sent in. An enthusiastic but unskilled admirer.” Tallulah Bankhead, equally at home in the world of tasty cuisine, confessed to always eating a full meal before attending a White House dinner.⁸ Members of FDR’s official family were equally caustic. “I am not very fussy about my food,” wrote Harold Ickes, “but it does seem a little out of proportion to use a solid-gold knife and fork on ordinary roast mutton.”⁹ Grace Tully, almost a regular at the dinner table in the Oval Study, complained that it was like a boardinghouse: One could tell the day of the week by what was set out for dinner—tongue with caper sauce on Mondays, boiled beef without any sauce on Tuesday, and so on.¹⁰

Running the White House was exclusively Eleanor’s domain, part of the balance of power she and FDR had achieved. And given her extensive public commitments, she was determined to have someone assist her who was loyal and trustworthy. Social awareness, an ability to cook, even a knowledge of food and wine were secondary. The assistant she chose was Henrietta Nesbitt, a fifty-nine-year-old Hyde Park matron active in the League of Women Voters. Mrs. Nesbitt did some home baking that Eleanor enjoyed, and in late 1932, just before Christmas, ER invited her to take charge of running the White House. “I don’t want a professional housekeeper. I want someone I know. I want you, Mrs. Nesbitt.”¹¹

Blanche Wiesen Cook called it Eleanor’s revenge. Mrs. Nesbitt, who had never been gainfully employed and had no supervisory experience, assumed the direction of a White House staff of twenty-six, including cooks, butlers, maids, pantry help, and waiters. “The housekeeper was one expression of her passive-aggressive behavior in a marriage of remarkable and labyrinthine complexity.”¹² Mrs. Nesbitt believed in plain food, plainly prepared.¹³ “Some of the dishes I served regularly were corned-beef hash, poached eggs, and creamed chipped beef. Sometimes, if the food was too simple, the President made wisecracks, and I’d have to stir myself and think up something fancy.”¹⁴ James Roosevelt called her “the worst cook I’ve ever encountered.”¹⁵ Actually, Mrs. Nesbitt did little cooking. But as one firsthand observer noted, “she stood over the cooks, making sure that each dish was overcooked or undercooked or ruined in one way or another.”¹⁶ Mrs. Nesbitt was devoted to ER. She displayed contempt for the president’s desires. When FDR complained of being served liver and beans three days in a row, Mrs. Nesbitt dismissed it. “Well, he was supposed to have them!”¹⁷ If he ordered something special, she ignored it.¹⁸ When the King and Queen of England wanted coffee, Mrs. Nesbitt sent iced tea. “It was better for them.”^19*

Roosevelt partially remedied the situation in 1941, after Sara died, when he brought her excellent cook, Mary Campbell, down from Hyde Park and installed her in the family kitchen on the third floor.²⁰ During the presidential campaign in 1944, FDR confided to his daughter, Anna, and Grace Tully, not entirely in jest, that the real reason he wanted to be elected to a fourth term was “so I can fire Mrs. Nesbitt.”²¹ That privilege fell to President Harry Truman shortly after he assumed office. Mrs. Truman had been asked to bring a stick of butter for the potluck luncheon of the Senate wives’ bridge club. When Mrs. Nesbitt refused to give her one—the White House was rationed, she said—President Truman sent her packing that afternoon.²²

FDR’s immediate staff was totally devoted to him and militantly nonideological. Their loyalty was personal. They avoided policy debates and would have followed the president in whatever direction he chose. Howe, Missy, and Grace Tully had been with him throughout the Albany years. Early, McIntyre, and Pa Watson were old Washington hands. All three were southerners: Early, the grandson of Confederate general Jubal Early, was from Virginia, McIntyre from Kentucky, and Watson from Alabama. Early and McIntyre, both former newsmen, handled the foibles of the press and members of Congress with unflappable aplomb. Watson, a much-decorated Army officer, had been an aide to Woodrow Wilson at Versailles and was a man with an eternally sunny outlook. “I have never known anyone just like him,” Ickes wrote. “He simply bubbles with good humor. He was great fun fishing and he was equally great fun playing poker. He could be relied upon to keep us all in a mellow humor, and this without any effort on his part, but simply by being himself.”²³

Poker and fishing were two of FDR’s diversions in the White House. Missy arranged the poker sessions, often at Harold Ickes’s suburban Maryland estate, where the food was certain to be good and the company congenial. In addition to Watson, Early, and McIntyre, the group usually included Harry Hopkins and Henry Morgenthau. Later, the lawyers William Douglas, Tommy Corcoran, and Robert H. Jackson joined the round—Corcoran with his accordion and Irish charm. Like the “children’s hour,” Roosevelt relished the convivial aspects of poker and played for penny-ante stakes. Vice President Garner, who took his poker as seriously as his bourbon, dismissed FDR’s sessions as “just for conversation.”²⁴

In the evening after dinner Roosevelt read, watched a movie (two or three times a week), or worked on his stamp collection. His reading ran toward history and biography; among movies, he wanted something cheerful and not overly long. Mickey Mouse shorts were always on the bill.²⁵But it was his stamp collection that absorbed him. FDR took infinite pleasure in perusing philatelic catalogues and placing orders for obscure issues. By the time he entered the White House, his childhood collection had grown to more than 25,000 stamps in some forty albums. Sometime in the twenties he had begun to specialize, focusing on stamps from the Western Hemisphere and Hong Kong. Roosevelt asked the clerks in the White House mail room to be on the lookout for unusual stamps and literally spent hours alone in his upstairs study with tweezers and hinges, mounting new arrivals in his albums. Shortly before midnight he was wheeled into his bedroom and went to sleep—reportedly within five minutes from the time he was undressed. Unlike other presidents, Roosevelt instructed the Secret Service not to lock the doors of his room at night.²⁶ He also removed the interior guards in the White House (Hoover had stationed two on each floor) and assigned the Secret Service to a post in the usher’s office off the north portico. Both FDR and Eleanor had no fear for their personal safety.

When Congress adjourned June 16, FDR departed for a two-week vacation sailing the New England coast. His son James had chartered a forty-five-foot schooner, Amberjack II, and the president planned to sail from Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts, around Cape Cod, four hundred miles to Campobello—his first trip to the island since he had been stricken twelve years before.²⁷ “I am having a bang-up good time, and I do not intend to go ashore anywhere along the coast,” Roosevelt told newsmen his third day out. “This is my vacation and I am going to stay aboard this boat the whole two weeks.”²⁸

FDR’s crew was the same that had sailed with him to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after the Democratic convention. But instead of making the trip solo, Amberjack II was accompanied by two destroyers (USS Ellis and USS Bernadou), three Coast Guard cutters, two press boats, and the Navy’s newly commissioned heavy cruiser, USS Indianapolis.^* Roosevelt knew the coast thoroughly and put his small craft into places where the naval flotilla could not follow. He had no radio and for three days was stranded by heavy fog in Lakeman Bay, off the Maine coast. FDR savored every moment. He navigated through dangerously rough seas and heavy squalls that terrified the Secret Service.²⁹ In the treacherous shoal-ridden waters off Gloucester, where more than ten thousand seamen had perished, the accompanying naval vessels plowed cautiously along behind Amberjack II, trusting FDR’s navigational judgment.³⁰ Except for charts and a compass, Roosevelt had no navigation aids and relied on memory and intuition to know where he should go. He sailed by dead reckoning, a skill not unlike that he had recently displayed in Washington.

On the afternoon of June 29, 1933, after almost ten hours of coping with fearsome tides and currents, FDR sailed through the Lubec narrows into Passamaquoddy Bay. James hoisted the presidential pennant to the masthead, and FDR tacked effortlessly around Friar’s Head to the dock at Welchpool, on Campobello Island. As Amberjack II crossed the bow of the Indianapolis, the warship rendered honors, ship’s complement manning the rails while the guns boomed a twenty-one-gun salute. When Roosevelt was helped ashore, it marked the first time he had left the schooner since the trip had begun on June 18. He was the first American president to visit Canada while in office, and the outpouring of affection from the islanders, many of whom had known the Roosevelts for two and three generations, was overwhelming. “I was figuring this morning on the passage of time,” said FDR in his arrival remarks, “and I remembered that I was brought here because I was teething forty-nine years ago. I was thinking also, as I came through the Narrows and saw the line of fishing boats and the people on the wharves, both here at Welchpool and also at Eastport [Maine], that this reception here is probably the finest example of friendship between nations—permanent friendship between nations—that we can possibly have.”³¹

Roosevelt remained at Campobello four days. While there he took advantage of his absence from Washington to launch a torpedo that ultimately sank the World Monetary and Economic Conference meeting in London. At the behest of Britain and France, with reluctant U.S. support, representatives of sixty-six nations had convened in the British capital on June 20 to stabilize world currencies. FDR had studied and reflected on the matter during his cruise northward and by the time he arrived at Campobello had concluded that it was not in America’s interest to stabilize the dollar. It would be preferable for the U.S. economy to allow the dollar to float.

On the afternoon of June 30 FDR invited the newsmen who had accompanied him for a buffet lunch at the family cottage. After lunch and a few hands of bridge, the president pushed back his wheelchair and said, “I think it might be more interesting to talk for a while.” According to Charles Hurd of The New York Times, FDR “looked at his watch, and added, ‘You’ll want to go back to your dock with the tide, which gives us about an hour.’ (We were amazed that Roosevelt, then probably the busiest man in the world, could take time to keep up with the tide variations in Campobello.)”

FDR ranged over a variety of topics but soon focused on the London conference. “Etiquette forbade us to take notes,” Hurd said. “We listened.” Roosevelt made clear that while he was much in favor of international accommodation, “the United States was not going to be pushed around.” He would not agree to any pegging of the dollar that would benefit foreign countries at American expense. The newsmen—all hardened veterans who had covered the White House for years—were stunned.

“Is that for publication, Mr. President?” asked one reporter.

“No, it is off the record.… Of course, if you were simply discussing this on your own, would you not possibly reach the same conclusion?”

“Mr. President, you know very well that no one cares a whit what we think; we don’t make the policy.”

“Well, how you handle anything you write is up to you,” said FDR. “But isn’t a Campobello dateline a pretty good hedge?”³²

The following day, July 1, 1933, The New York Times broke Hurd’s story on page one. Diplomatic notes dribbled back and forth across the Atlantic for the next two weeks, but for all practical purposes the London conference was dead. Raymond Moley, who had been appointed assistant secretary of state and who ramrodded American efforts in London, felt undercut by FDR and soon resigned from the administration. Secretary of State Hull, always uncomfortable with Moley as assistant secretary, shed no tear, and Roosevelt never had a second thought about torpedoing the conference. “I’m prouder of that than anything I ever did,” he told Arthur Krock in 1937.³³

An equally serious foreign policy issue involved diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union. In 1933, the United States was the only major power that had not established formal relations with Moscow. The USSR had been a full participant in the London Economic Conference, it had become a vigorous trading partner for the nations of Europe, and it was abundantly clear that the Soviet regime would remain the government of Russia for the foreseeable future.

Under the Constitution the power of diplomatic recognition is entrusted exclusively to the president.^* And by the fall of 1933 Roosevelt had come to the conclusion that continued nonrecognition served no useful purpose. The furor of 1920s anti-Bolshevism had subsided, American business looked favorably on increasing trade, and the traditional rivalry between Russia and Japan in the Far East made the Soviet Union a reliable buffer against Japanese expansionism. A survey of 1,139 newspapers in September indicated that fewer than 27 percent opposed recognition. “I think the menace of Bolshevism in the United States is about as great as the menace of sunstroke in Greenland or chilblains in the Sahara,” said Roy Howard, head of the Scripps-Howard chain.³⁴

Opposition centered in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, the leadership of the AFL, and conservative patriotic groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution. FDR could safely ignore the DAR and Bill Green, but the Church required attention. Roosevelt turned on the charm. On September 4 he invited Father Edmund A. Walsh, the dean of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, to the White House for a chat. Walsh was one of the most outspoken critics of recognition, and his anti-Soviet public lectures at Washington’s Smithsonian Institution drew overflow crowds. An hour after meeting Roosevelt, Walsh told reporters he thought the president should be trusted to do what he thought was right.³⁵

Because the career diplomats in the State Department—many of whom had spent the last fifteen years hobnobbing with White Russian émigrés—were still imbued with nostalgia for the czarist past, Roosevelt handled the negotiations himself, first through Henry Morgenthau, then through William C. Bullitt.³⁶ Morgenthau, as head of the Farm Credit Administration, dealt with the Soviet trade organization Amtorg; Bullitt with Boris Skvirsky, the senior Russian commercial representative in the United States. As a result of these covert discussions, FDR invited Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov to Washington for direct negotiations in early November.³⁷ The ostensible outstanding issues involved freedom of religion for Americans in Russia and the continued agitation for world revolution mounted by the Comintern. The real sticking point was restitution of American property seized by the Soviet government in its nationalization decree of 1919.^* Roosevelt and Litvinov compromised. The agreement is known as the Litvinov Assignment. The Soviet government assigned to the United States its claim to all Russian property in the United States that antedated the Revolution. The United States agreed to seize the property on behalf of the Soviet Union, thus giving effect to the Soviet nationalization decree, and use the proceeds to pay the claims of Americans whose property in Russia had been confiscated. The constitutionality of the assignment was twice challenged before the Supreme Court, but in both instances it was upheld, the “taking clause” of the Constitution notwithstanding.^38†

Shortly after midnight on the morning of November 17, FDR and Litvinov signed the documents restoring diplomatic relations. At a farewell dinner for the Soviet foreign minister at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, business titans from J. P. Morgan, Chase, and other firms eager to do business with the USSR toasted the new era of recognition. Thomas Watson of IBM asked Americans to “refrain from making any criticism of the present form of government adopted by Russia.”³⁹

Meanwhile, the National Industrial Recovery Act was having birthing problems. Enacted the last day of the session, the act established two complementary agencies: the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to coordinate economic recovery, and the Public Works Administration (PWA), authorized to spend $3.3 billion in pump-priming construction projects. NRA and PWA, as one historian has written, “were to be like two lungs, each necessary for breathing life into the moribund industrial sector.”⁴⁰ But FDR made the fatal error of dividing responsibility. To head the NRA, Roosevelt brought in former brigadier general Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson, a flamboyant protégé of Bernard Baruch, renowned for his can-do military spirit and robust invective. Hard drinking and hard living, Johnson said of his appointment, “It will be red fire at first and dead cats afterward”—evidently an old Army expression.⁴¹ For PWA, the president turned to Harold Ickes. No two appointees could have been more dissimilar, and no two less likely to cooperate. For Johnson, an old cavalryman, every undertaking was a hell-for-leather charge into the face of the enemy. Ickes, on the other hand, was pathologically prudent. As he saw it, the problem of the public works program was not to spend money quickly but to spend it wisely. Obsessively tightfisted, personally examining every project in minute detail, Ickes spent a minuscule $110 million of PWA money in 1933.⁴²

The failure of the Public Works Administration to provide economic stimulus doomed NRA’s recovery efforts from the start. Without a significant infusion of construction money, the NRA could not expand the economy. Johnson labored mightily to create industry codes that would control production, fix prices, and regulate working conditions. But without money to prime the pump, he was simply redistributing scarcity. When that became apparent, the brief spurt of popularity NRA enjoyed evaporated. Enforcing industry codes became impossible, and in early 1935 the Supreme Court administered the coup de grâce when it struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act as unconstitutional.⁴³ Chief Justice Hughes, speaking for a unanimous Court, held that the code-making authority given to the president constituted an impermissible delegation of legislative authority to the executive branch. In a concurring opinion, Justice Benjamin Cardozo, normally in sympathy with the New Deal, called the NIRA “delegation running riot.”⁴⁴ FDR soon castigated the horse-and-buggy mentality of the Court, and its decision to overturn the NIRA later contributed to his desire to restructure the judicial branch.⁴⁵ But the day the decision came down, Roosevelt was relieved.^* The Court had bailed him out of a program that was increasingly unpopular and unsuccessful. “You know the whole thing has been a mess,” FDR told Frances Perkins.

“It has been an awful headache,” said Roosevelt. “Some of the things they have done in NRA are pretty wrong.… I don’t want to impose a system on this country that will set aside the anti-trust laws on any permanent basis. So let’s give the NRA a certain amount of time to liquidate. Have a history of it written, and then it will be over.”⁴⁶

As the winter of 1933–34 approached, Roosevelt recognized that Ickes’s caution in spending PWA money was creating few jobs and doing little to ease the suffering of the destitute. Faced with the critical need to tide people over the winter, FDR turned to Hopkins. Could he provide temporary jobs for 4 million people? Hopkins said he could if he had the money. Roosevelt mentally computed the cost—he assumed it would require an additional $400 million—and decided to tap Ickes’s underused Public Works budget for the funds. He delegated Hopkins, Frances Perkins, and Henry Wallace to break the news to Ickes and on November 9, 1933, issued an executive order establishing the Civil Works Administration with Hopkins as director.⁴⁷

As Roosevelt anticipated, Hopkins moved quickly. He shifted staff from FERA to the CWA, raided Army warehouses for tools and equipment, and dragooned the Veterans Administration—the one federal agency with a national disbursement system in place—into becoming the CWA’s paymaster.⁴⁸ Unlike relief programs, the Civil Works Administration provided jobs. Within ten days Hopkins had put more than 800,000 people to work, 2.6 million by mid-December, and by early January he was well over the 4 million mark. The CWA paid the prevailing minimum wage for unskilled labor, and the work was seasonal. When it went out of existence in April 1934, the CWA had pumped close to $1 billion into the ailing economy. Eighty percent of that had gone directly into workers’ wages, with the bulk of the remainder paid out for equipment and material.⁴⁹ Less than 2 percent went for administrative overhead— another Hopkins hallmark.

In the bitter winter of 1933–34, with record low temperatures gripping the nation, the CWA laid 12 million feet of sewer pipe and built or upgraded 500,000 miles of secondary roads, 40,000 schools, 3,700 recreation areas, and nearly a thousand airports. It employed 50,000 teachers to keep rural schools open and to provide adult education in the cities. It hired 3,000 artists and writers—and they worked as artists and writers. “Hell,” said Hopkins, “they’ve got to eat like other people.”⁵⁰ The CWA did more than provide an overdue cash infusion to the economy; it restored a nation’s self-respect. “We aren’t on relief any more,” said a proud woman in Iowa. “My husband is working for the government.”⁵¹

Lieutenant Colonel John C. H. Lee, detailed by the Army to study the CWA, watched with astonishment as Hopkins put people to work in every county and every town in the country in less than two months. In World War I it had taken the Army a year and a half to muster as many men, said Lee, and, unlike the Army, Hopkins paid his people weekly. Lee, whose personal style ran heavily along authoritarian lines,^* expressed unaccustomed admiration for Hopkins’s informality with his youthful staff. “These assistants address Mr. Hopkins fondly as ‘Harry.’ There is no rigidity or formality, yet he holds their respect, confidence and whole-souled cooperation.”⁵²

The second session of the Seventy-third Congress convened on January 3, 1934. FDR was still the quarterback calling plays, but the opposition had begun to coalesce. Republicans were recovering from their postelection shell shock, and in the Democratic party both the far left and the extreme right were in incipient revolt. Roosevelt held the high ground, and at his recommendation Congress enacted legislation establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the investment industry and the Federal Communications Commission to control the airwaves.⁵³But the majorities behind the bills were smaller, and in the case of the SEC, passage required the president’s personal intervention.^† Congress also enacted the Railroad Retirement Act to provide mandatory pension coverage in the rail industry and agreed to fix the price of gold at $35 an ounce.⁵⁴ After allowing the dollar to float for a year, Roosevelt decided to devalue it permanently at 59 percent of its previous worth.⁵⁵ When the Seventy-third Congress adjourned sine die on June 18, FDR wrote Speaker Rainey, “It’s been a grand session—the best in all our history.”⁵⁶

Two weeks later, Roosevelt went to the people. In his first fireside chat of 1934, FDR asked Americans to judge the progress of recovery for themselves. “Are you better off today than you were last year? Are your debts less burdensome? Is your bank account more secure?” Roosevelt mocked “the Doubting Thomases” who decried the loss of liberty. “Answer this question also out of the facts of your own life. Have you lost any of your rights or liberty or constitutional freedom of action and choice?” It was a powerful performance—as powerful as any speech Roosevelt had given.⁵⁷

On July 1, 1934, the president boarded the USS Houston, a sister ship of the Indianapolis, for a 14,000-mile trip to the Hawaiian Islands via the Panama Canal—his favorite form of relaxation. The second session of the Seventy-third Congress had not been the bed of roses FDR’s letter to Rainey suggested. Roosevelt’s rivals for control of the party did not take their exclusion lightly. “It is difficult today,” wrote the conservative pundit Frank Kent, “to name any outstanding Democratic leader of the pre–New Deal period who is in sympathy with the Roosevelt policy.”⁵⁸ Passage of the Securities Exchange Act confirmed the schism. Al Smith, John W. Davis, Newton D. Baker, and the remnants of the Raskob-Shouse organization joined ranks in an attempt to return the party to its pre-Roosevelt, probusiness moorings. “Who is Ickes?” asked Al Smith rhetorically. “Who is Hopkins? And in the name of all that’s holy, who is Tugwell? Is La Guardia a Democrat?^* If he is, then I am a Chinaman with a haircut.”⁵⁹

In August 1934, with generous financial backing from the du Ponts, General Motors, Sun Oil, and Montgomery Ward, the dissidents formed the American Liberty League, with Jouett Shouse as president. The League’s avowed objectives were to teach respect for the rights of property and require government to encourage private enterprise. Asked about the formation of the League at his press conference shortly afterward, Roosevelt was withering: “When you define American principles you want to go whole hog. An organization that only advocates two or three out of the Ten Commandments may be a perfectly good organization, but it would have certain shortcomings in having failed to advocate the other seven or eight.”⁶⁰ To William Bullitt, now the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, FDR wrote, “All the big guns have started shooting. Their organization has already been labeled the ‘I Can’t Take It Club.’ ”⁶¹

In 1934 Roosevelt did not worry about defections on the right. What concerned him were the critics on the left. Huey Long had burst the confines of the Bayou State and was barnstorming the nation to make “every man a king.” FDR had worked diligently to keep Long inside the administration tent pissing out, but the Kingfish was now outside pissing in. Long’s Share Our Wealth clubs claimed a mailing list of 7.5 million persons. The program was blindingly simple. Long proposed to confiscate large personal fortunes, levy steeply progressive income taxes, and redistribute the revenue to every American family so they could buy a home, a car, and a radio. In addition, each family would receive a guaranteed annual wage of $2,500—roughly double the median family income at the time. The elderly would receive pensions, the young would be provided college educations, and veterans would receive their bonuses. Long meant trouble, and FDR did not underestimate his appeal.^*

Marching almost in lockstep with Long was Father Charles Coughlin, a parish priest in Royal Oak, Michigan, whose weekly radio sermons drew a national audience estimated as high as 40 million.⁶² Like Long, Coughlin initially supported FDR. But as the New Deal took shape, he became increasingly critical. The Radio Priest, as he was called, railed against the power of “international money,” lauded silver as the “gentile” metal, and was soon accusing Roosevelt of having out-Hoovered Hoover. By the fall of 1934 Coughlin was calling for a political realignment. “The old parties are all but dead,” he told his Sunday audience. They should “relinquish the skeletons of their putrefying carcasses to the halls of a historical museum.”⁶³ Because he had been born in Canada, Coughlin was not a rival for the presidency like Long. But his National Union for Social Justice, formed in November 1934, was another wild card of which Roosevelt had to beware.

The most benign, yet in some ways the most serious, threat was headed by Dr. Francis Everett Townsend, an unemployed physician in Long Beach, California. Townsend proposed to pay a monthly pension of $200 (roughly $2,600 currently) to every citizen over sixty, on the condition that he or she retire and promise to spend the sum within the coming month. Pensions would be financed by a business transaction tax of 2 percent. Advocates argued that this would reduce unemployment because older workers would yield their jobs to younger people who had none. And the mandatory spending of pension checks would produce a demand for goods and services that would create still more jobs.⁶⁴ The Townsend Plan was far from radical. It appealed to heavily Protestant rural America, proclaimed traditional values, and promised to preserve the profit system free from alien collectivism, socialism, and godless communism. As Townsend put it, the movement embraced people “who believe in the Bible, believe in God, cheer when the flag passes by, the Bible Belt solid Americans.”⁶⁵ It was a movement FDR dared not ignore.

The congressional elections in November 1934 provided the first political test of Roosevelt’s policies. Cognizant of the midterm tradition, in which the president’s party normally suffers a decline, Vice President Garner predicted the Republicans would pick up only thirty-seven seats in the House, a gain so small it could be regarded as “a complete victory” for the administration.⁶⁶ Farley thought the party would hold its own and the results would be “about even”—a forecast FDR thought recklessly optimistic.⁶⁷ Farley was closer than Garner, but both underestimated the strength of Roosevelt’s appeal. Contrary to the predictions of the most seasoned political pros, the Democrats won an additional twelve seats in the House of Representatives and gained nine in the Senate.^*

In the House, the Democratic majority increased from 310 to 322 (against 103 Republicans), and in the Senate the Democrats held 69 seats—5 more than a two-thirds majority.⁶⁸ Never in the history of the Republican party had its percentage in either House been so low. In the statehouses and governor’s mansions across the nation the rout was equally great. When the dust settled from the 1934 election, the GOP retained only seven governorships, as opposed to thirty-nine for the Democrats and one each for the Progressives and Farmer-Laborites.

In The New York Times, Arthur Krock said the New Deal had won “the most overwhelming victory in the history of American politics.” William Allen White proclaimed that FDR had been “all but crowned by the people.” William Randolph Hearst said simply, “The forgotten man does not forget.”⁶⁹

At the end of 1934 the recovery had yet to gain traction. The nation’s GDP registered a 17 percent increase over the dismal figures for 1932 and 1933, but national income was still little better than half of what it had been in 1929. And while more than 2 million persons had found jobs, the unemployment rate remained at an uncomfortable 21.7 percent.⁷⁰ Yet as the November election results showed, the mood of the country was on the upswing. Broadway, which had dimmed its lights in 1933, had its best season in five years.⁷¹ Sixteen new plays (plus six new musicals) opened on the Great White Way, featuring a who’s who of theatrical talent: James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Jean Arthur, Walter Huston, Melvyn Douglas, Tallulah Bankhead, Judith Anderson, Claude Rains, and Ethel Merman. Clark Gable sent men’s underwear sales plunging when he removed his shirt and revealed a bare chest in It Happened One Night—for which he, Claudette Colbert, and director Frank Capra all won Academy Awards. Albert Einstein made his musical debut, playing second violin (Bach’s “Concerto for Two Violins”) in a benefit performance for displaced scientists in Nazi Berlin. In California, Ernest and Julio Gallo invested $5,900 to enter the wine business, and Sears, Roebuck commenced carrying contraceptive devices in its catalog.⁷²

The Seventy-fourth Congress, swept into office on an enormous wave of support for the New Deal, was more than ready to follow Roosevelt’s lead. First on the president’s agenda was a comprehensive social insurance program that would provide unemployment compensation and old-age and survivor benefits, as well as aid for dependent children and the handicapped. In June 1934, FDR had announced his intention to provide for social security but said he would wait until the new Congress convened before sending up a specific proposal.⁷³ To draft that proposal, he appointed a special cabinet committee chaired by Secretary of Labor Perkins.^* “Keep it simple,” Roosevelt told Perkins. “So simple that everybody will understand it.” The basic concept was universal coverage. “I see no reason why every child, from the day he is born, shouldn’t be a member of the social security system,” said FDR.

When he begins to grow up, he should know he will have old-age benefits direct from the insurance system to which he will belong all his life. If he is out of work, he gets a benefit. If he is sick or crippled, he gets a benefit.… Cradle to the grave—from the cradle to the grave everyone ought to be in the social security system.⁷⁴

Frances Perkins said Roosevelt looked on social security as his personal project, and he knew that if it were going to be enacted he had to move quickly during the early days of the session. Members of Congress were spooked by the Townsend Plan, and FDR had to steal the march or be overwhelmed.

The cabinet committee submitted its report to FDR on January 15, 1935, and two days later he sent the draft bill for social security to Congress.⁷⁵ Roosevelt took no chances. The principal congressional advocates of social security were Robert Wagner in the Senate and David Lewis of Maryland in the House. But because the bill would go through the normal committee process, FDR insisted that the legislation be known as the Harrison-Doughton bill—for Mississippi’s Pat Harrison, who chaired the Senate Finance Committee, and Robert L. Doughton of North Carolina, who chaired the Ways and Means Committee in the House. Frances Perkins drew the unenviable task of reconciling Wagner and Lewis to Roosevelt’s decision.⁷⁶

From the beginning the scheme was self-funding, the contributions to be paid jointly by employers and employees. That was at FDR’s insistence. He instructed Perkins to ensure that no government contribution would be required. The plan must be actuarially sound. “It is almost dishonest,” said Roosevelt, “to build up an accumulated deficit for the Congress of the United States to meet in 1980. We can’t do that. We can’t sell the United States short in 1980 any more than in 1935.”⁷⁷ Benefits would be proportional to a person’s earnings. In effect—and contrary to the rule in most modern countries, where governments provide the major funding for pension plans—America’s social security system would be freestanding: a property right, not a civil right.⁷⁸ The downside of FDR’s insistence that social security pay its own way was the immediate adverse effect on the economy. To build the reserve fund from which to pay benefits required withdrawing money from workers’ wages—money that otherwise would be spent. Roosevelt understood that the payroll tax would be deflationary. But he was more concerned about what he called “legislative habits and prejudices.” “Those taxes were never a matter of economics,” FDR said later. “They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”⁷⁹

Roosevelt’s concern for the legislative pecking order paid quick dividends. Harrison and Doughton shepherded the legislation through their committees, and the floor fight was led by Wagner in the Senate and Lewis in the House. Opposition was strongest in the business community. “The dangers are manifest,” said Alfred Sloan, the president of General Motors. “With unemployment insurance no one will work; with old age and survivor benefits no one will save; the result will be moral decay and financial bankruptcy.” “Never in the history of the world,” said Representative John Taber of New York, “has any measure been brought in here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers, and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people.”⁸⁰ In the procedural motions that preceded final passage, House Republicans voted almost unanimously against social security. But when the final up-or-down vote came on April 19, fewer than half were prepared to go on record against. The final vote in the House of Representatives was a lopsided 371–33.

The debate in the Senate played along similar lines. In both Houses concern focused on old-age pensions rather than unemployment compensation. The administration’s proposal “would take all the romance out of life,” said New Jersey’s A. Harry Moore. “We might as well take a child from the nursery, give him a nurse, and protect him from every experience life affords.”⁸¹ When Daniel Hastings of Delaware moved to delete pension coverage from the bill, 12 of the 19 Republicans voted in favor. They were tilting at windmills. When the Senate voted on June 19, social security sailed through, 76–6. Roosevelt signed the measure into law in an elaborate White House ceremony on August 14, 1935.⁸² Commemorative pens were presented to Harrison, Wagner, Doughton, Lewis, and Frances Perkins. FDR always regarded the Social Security Act as the cornerstone of the New Deal, said Miss Perkins. “I think he took greater satisfaction from it than from anything else he achieved on the domestic front.”⁸³

The Social Security Act of 1935 was far from perfect. Despite Roosevelt’s desire for universal coverage, only 60 percent of the labor force was initially insured. Farm laborers and domestics—two categories of workers who needed security most—were not covered, nor were teachers, nurses, and those who worked in firms employing fewer than ten people.^* Benefits for other programs, such as unemployment compensation, aid to the handicapped, and support for dependent children, varied substantially from state to state.⁸⁴ And the provisions for health care and housing that FDR had originally requested proved impossible to obtain. Nevertheless, passage of the act marked a watershed in American history. The responsibility of the nation toward its citizens was redefined. “If, as our Constitution tells us, our Federal Government was established among other things ‘to promote the general welfare,’ ” said FDR, “it is our plain duty to provide for that security upon which welfare depends.”⁸⁵

The second item on Roosevelt’s 1935 agenda was to curtail relief and find jobs for the unemployed. In his State of the Union message on January 4, FDR recommended “the orderly liquidation” of existing relief agencies and the adoption of a national plan to provide work for 3.5 million people currently on the dole. “The Federal Government,” said the president, “is the only governmental agency with sufficient power and credit to meet this situation.”⁸⁶ Congress responded on April 8 with the largest appropriation in American history: $4.8 billion for Roosevelt to spend largely as he saw fit.⁸⁷

With the money in hand, the question for FDR was how to organize work relief. The choice was whether to rely on Harold Ickes and a monumental program of public works or turn to Hopkins who surely knew how to put money in circulation. The rivalry between Hopkins and Ickes to be top dog spending the $4.8 billion was intense. Ickes claimed Hopkins wanted to prime the pump with a fire hose; Hopkins called Ickes stubborn and self-righteous.^88* Ultimately FDR turned to Hopkins. “Ickes is a good administrator,” the president told Donald Richberg (who had succeeded Hugh Johnson at the NRA), “but often too slow. Harry gets things done. I am going to give this job to Harry.”⁸⁹ Roosevelt hived off about a quarter of the appropriation for Ickes, gave a small amount to Agriculture secretary Wallace, but awarded the bulk to Hopkins. On May 6, 1935, the president issued an executive order establishing the Works Progress Administration (WPA), “which shall be responsible to the President for the honest, efficient, speedy, and coordinated execution of the work relief program as a whole, and for the execution of that program in such manner as to move from the relief rolls to work on such projects or in private employment the maximum number of persons in the shortest time possible.”⁹⁰ Hopkins was appointed director; his mandate was to put people to work.

For Hopkins, administering an ongoing work relief effort proved far more complicated than managing the spurt of seasonal jobs provided during the winter of 1933. Federal contracting regulations intervened, paperwork increased exponentially, and on-site supervision became exceedingly time-consuming. Hopkins’s small but dedicated staff was initially overwhelmed. Assistance came out of the blue from an unlikely source: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“Mr. Hopkins was having a great difficulty getting underway,” said General Lucius D. Clay, later military governor of Germany. “And I went over with General [Edward M.] Markham [chief of engineers] to see Mr. Hopkins, and said, ‘We would like to lend to you, in each of your regions, a capable, competent Engineer officer who would bring with him a capable and competent chief clerk who knows how to disperse and set up public funds, just to get you going.’ ”

Clay said Hopkins was very suspicious at first but accepted the offer, and the Corps sent many of its best officers to assist the WPA: Colonel Brehon Somervell, who would later head the Army’s entire logistical effort in World War II, took over the troubled WPA district in New York; Colonel Francis Harrington became Hopkins’s own deputy; Colonel Donald Connolly headed the program in Los Angeles. “All around the country we provided the basic, experienced staff in knowing how to put government money to work under the proper controls, to let Mr. Hopkins get underway.”^*

The Corps of Engineers’ support for WPA was scarcely disinterested. Just as the CCC program brought many Army officers into contact with the New Deal, the WPA gave a fresh lease on life to the Corps in its battle with Secretary Ickes for control of the nation’s rivers and harbors. “You’ve got to remember that you’re always fighting for position,” said Clay. “It seemed to me that the best way we could establish ourselves was to make ourselves helpful. Frankly, I would have to admit that if we hadn’t felt that Mr. Ickes was trying to give us trouble, we might not have thought of going to Mr. Hopkins.” And as Clay—whose father had been a three-term U.S. senator from Georgia—knew very well, in Washington one hand washes the other. “In our subsequent conflicts with Mr. Ickes over flood control, Mr. Hopkins was definitely on our side.”⁹¹

In the first year of its existence the WPA put more than 3 million people to work, and over a span of eight years it employed upward of 8.5 million while pumping some $11 billion into the economy. Projects ranged from make-work undertakings of little lasting value to the construction of schools (5,900), hospitals (2,500), parks (8,000), playgrounds (13,000), and highways (572,000 miles). The WPA restored the Dock Street Theater in Charleston, constructed Timberline Lodge on the slopes of Mount Hood, and ran a pack-horse library in the hills of Kentucky.⁹² Hopkins funneled money into the arts and entertainment as well. The Federal Music Project sponsored dozens of symphony orchestras, jazz groups, and native ensembles. The Federal Theatre Project brought plays, vaudeville acts, and puppet shows to many who had never seen a stage production. In four years WPA-supported theater played to audiences that totaled more than 30 million. The Federal Art Project employed at one time or another some 9,000 of the 40,000 registered artists and craftsmen in the country to teach their trade, restore objects of art, and paint murals (often controversial) in public buildings. “Some of it was good,” said FDR, “some of it not so good, but all of it native, human, eager, and alive: All of it painted in their own country, and painted about things that they know and look at often and have touched and loved.”⁹³ Many of the artists had little talent, but the program also gave a helping hand to some who would achieve international renown, such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Perhaps the most successful cultural endeavor was the Federal Writers Project, which put writers to work preparing the American Guide Series, an encyclopedic and still useful set of guidebooks to each of the states and major cities. The writers included Conrad Aiken, John Cheever, and Richard Wright, whose “Uncle Tom’s Children” won Story magazine’s first prize for a story by an FWP writer.⁹⁴ The outpouring of literature under the sponsorship of the WPA was “one of the most remarkable phenomena of the era of crisis,” wrote the critic Alfred Kazin. “Whatever form this literature took … it testified to an extraordinary national self-scrutinizing.… Never before did a nation seem so hungry for news of itself.”⁹⁵

Throughout its existence the WPA was a lightning rod for criticism. As director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and CWA, Hopkins, the former social worker, had been remarkably nonpartisan. But a national work relief program with an initial $4.8 billion budget inevitably fell victim to party politics. When Congress amended the Work Relief Bill to require senatorial confirmation for appointees earning more than $5,000, Hopkins realized his apolitical days were over. “They told me I had to be part non-political and part political. I found that was impossible, at least for me. I finally realized there was nothing for it but to be all political.”⁹⁶ Republicans complained that the WPA was a gigantic patronage boondoggle operated for the benefit of the Democratic party.⁹⁷ Critics on the left, led by The Nation, bellyached the WPA was a misguided attempt to aid America’s “crippled capitalist system” by forcing workers to settle for “depressed wages in a federal work gang.”⁹⁸ Conservative southerners bridled at what they perceived to be the breakdown of white supremacy and a mixing of the races in various WPA programs. Hopkins, whom Joseph E. Davies once described as a combination of Saint Francis of Assisi and a racetrack tout, took the criticism as a badge of honor.⁹⁹ “I haven’t a thing to apologize about,” he told an audience in Los Angeles. “If we have made mistakes we have made them in the interests of the people that were broke.”¹⁰⁰

The two final accomplishments of the New Deal in 1935 were the creation of the Rural Electrification Administration and the passage of the Wagner Labor Relations Act. FDR established the REA by executive order on May 11, 1935.¹⁰¹ Nothing has done more to eliminate rural poverty than bringing electricity to the countryside. In 1935 only 11 percent of American farms had electricity; in Mississippi, less than 1 percent. Under REA, nonprofit rural cooperatives were organized to build power lines and distribute electricity, financed by long-term federal loans at low (3 percent) interest rates. In the South, power came primarily from the Tennessee Valley Authority. In the Northwest, from Bonneville and Grand Coulee; from Boulder (Hoover) Dam on the Colorado and Fort Peck on the Missouri. By the end of 1941, almost 50 percent of the nation’s farms had been electrified. World War II interrupted the construction of power lines for four years, but by the end of the 1940s there was virtually no farm without electricity.^* Families that had lit their homes with coal oil lamps; families who had no washing machines, refrigerators, or vacuum cleaners; dairy farms that milked by hand—all now shared the growing prosperity of a modernizing America. With the possible exception of the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, no single action by the New Deal had a greater impact on daily life in the American countryside than rural electrification.¹⁰²

FDR was the prime mover behind rural electrification. The Wagner Labor Relations Act, which recognized the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively, owed its passage almost entirely to the unstinting efforts of Senator Robert Wagner of New York. In the early days of the New Deal, Roosevelt saw himself as a neutral arbiter between labor and management. He shied away from endorsing legislation that would enshrine collective bargaining and in fact had prevailed upon Wagner not to introduce his bill before the 1934 elections. But when the Seventy-fourth Congress convened, Wagner was quick off the mark pressing labor’s right to organize and the establishment of a National Labor Relations Board to guarantee it. Reflecting his German trade union heritage (Wagner’s father had been a printer in Wiesbaden), Wagner was one of the few Democrats who identified with the union movement. His long legislative career, in both Albany and Washington, had been dedicated to supporting labor’s cause. In the Senate he acquired a reputation as a peerless legislative craftsman, and unlike many other progressives he did not bloviate at the drop of a hat. Wagner played by the rules of the Senate club and was respected by his colleagues for it. By 1935 he was recognized as the Senate’s resident expert on labor matters. After lengthy hearings in March and April in which industry spokesmen lambasted the bill (even the columnist Walter Lippmann called it “one of the most reactionary measures of our time”), the Senate Labor Committee reported it unanimously on May 2.¹⁰³ Two weeks later, after only two days of debate, the Senate added its approval 63–12, with four conservative Democrats and eight Republicans voting against. It was a remarkable achievement, for which Wagner deserved the credit.

Roosevelt still declined to take a stand. The act would be divisive, and FDR wanted to remain above the fray. Even the possibility of a veto could not be ruled out. “It seems almost inevitable that the Administration would have much to lose in public support” if the bill became law, Commerce secretary Daniel Roper told FDR on May 22.¹⁰⁴ But the following week the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA and in the process gutted the nascent collective bargaining provisions contained in the act.¹⁰⁵ The public outcry convinced FDR that the time for Wagner’s bill had come. He placed himself at the head of the parade, and the measure whipped through the House of Representatives without a roll call. It was signed into law on July 5, 1935.¹⁰⁶

In November, FDR resumed his practice of spending Thanksgiving at Warm Springs. On the twenty-ninth he journeyed to Atlanta, where he was received at a massive homecoming rally at the Georgia Tech football stadium. Roosevelt was at his rhetorical best:

You cannot borrow your way out of debt, but you can invest your way into a sounder future.… Over three years ago, realizing that we were not doing a perfect thing but that we were doing a necessary thing, we appropriated money for direct relief. But just as quickly as possible we turned to the job of providing actual work for those in need.

I realize that gentlemen in well-warmed and well-stocked clubs will discourse on the expenses of Government and the suffering that they are going through because their Government is spending money on work relief. Some of these same gentlemen tell me that a dole would be more economical than work relief. That is true. But the men who tell me that have, unfortunately, too little contact with the true America to realize that … most Americans want to give something for what they get. That something, which in this case is honest work, is the saving barrier between them and moral degradation. I propose to build that barrier high and keep it high.¹⁰⁷

^* “The cold fact is that on important matters we are seldom called upon for advice,” said Ickes. “We never discuss exhaustively any policy of government or question of political strategy. The President makes all of his own decisions and so far as the Cabinet is concerned, without taking counsel with a group of advisors.” 1 The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 308 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953).

^* Roosevelt was not a heavy drinker. Except on formal occasions he never drank wine with dinner and rarely had anything afterward. He enjoyed the social aspects of the “children’s hour” and spent most of his time mixing drinks for others. Usually he had only one, two at the most, drinks himself. John Gunther, a frequent guest at the “children’s hour,” complained that FDR used inferior Argentine vermouth and a substandard gin in his martinis, though it was rumored he stocked a better quality for favored guests. John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 95 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).

^* Mrs. Nesbitt was equally capricious in her role as chief housekeeper. One day preparing for the arrival of a Latin American head of state, presumably President Getúlio Vargas of Brazil, she told the staff, “Don’t bother to put the good linen sheets on the beds for these people.” Lillian Rogers Parks and Frances S. Leighton, The Roosevelts: A Family in Turmoil 31–32 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981).

^* Reporters accompanying FDR invariably datelined their dispatches “At Sea with President Roosevelt.” Charles Hurd, When the New Deal Was Young and Gay 154 (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1965).

^* The cryptic words of Article II that the president shall send and receive ambassadors provide the textual basis for the president’s recognition authority. “In every case the question of recognition was determined solely by the Executive,” wrote John Bassett Moore, the dean of international law scholars, after reciting an exhaustive survey of precedent. 3 International Law Digest 243–244 (1906). Also see Goldwater v. Carter, 444 U.S. 996 (1979), pertaining to President Carter’s 1978 decision to withdraw diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China.

^* The issue was not unlike the claim for the restitution of Tory property asserted by Great Britain after the American Revolution and dealt with in the Treaty of Paris of 1783 and the Jay Treaty of 1794.

^† The “taking clause” of the Constitution, contained in the Fifth Amendment, provides: “nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.”

^* Justice Robert H. Jackson, then general counsel of the Treasury’s revenue arm, was in the Oval Office with FDR when he received a phone call from Donald Richberg of the NRA telling him of the Schechter decision. According to Jackson, “The conversation at the President’s end of the line ran something like this: ‘You mean it was unanimous against us? Where was old Isaiah?’ This was a favorite characterization of Justice Brandeis. He then asked, ‘What about Ben Cardozo?’ He then told us that the decision had gone against the government by all members of the Court. It was this feature that shocked him most.… We suggested to him that perhaps he had been relieved by the Court of a serious problem. He seemed inclined to agree with that view of it and I was somewhat surprised to read some days later of his [May 31, 1935] press conference remarks.” Robert H. Jackson, That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt 66, John Q. Barrett, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

^* In World War II, General Lee performed with distinction as Eisenhower’s supply chief in Europe, although his high-handed style, combined with his religious ardor, led him to be dubbed (based on his JCH initials) “Jesus Christ Himself” Lee. The moniker was used freely by both Lee’s admirers and detractors, which makes his 1934 comments about Hopkins’s style all the more pertinent. For Lee, see Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life 181 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990).

^† To head the Securities and Exchange Commission, FDR named Joseph P. Kennedy, an early supporter who had been disappointed he was passed over for the Treasury. When the press slammed the appointment because of Kennedy’s long record as a stock manipulator, Roosevelt beamed his delight. “Set a thief to catch a thief,” he grinned, effectively ending the discussion. Kenneth S. Davis, Invincible Summer: An Intimate Portrait of the Roosevelts Based on the Recollections of Marion Dickerman 128–129 (New York: Atheneum, 1974).

^* Former Republican congressman Fiorello La Guardia had crossed party lines and was running for mayor of New York City as a Fusion candidate representing a coalition of disaffected Democrats, Republicans, reformers, and socialists.

^* James Farley believed that Long might poll 6 million votes. “I always laughed Huey off,” he told Harold Ickes after Long’s assassination in 1935. “But I did not feel that way about him.” And then Farley reeled off the states FDR would have lost had Long run against him. 1 The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 462.

^* The only time prior to 1934 the party in power gained seats in the House during an off-year election was in 1902, when the Republicans, under TR, gained eleven seats. Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections 928–929 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).

^* The cabinet Committee on Economic Security was composed of Frances Perkins, chairman, Henry Wallace (Agriculture), Henry Morgenthau (Treasury), Attorney General Homer Cummings, and Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins.

^* FDR’s initial proposal, as recommended by his cabinet committee, included all categories. But in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, Secretary Morgenthau broke ranks. Because of the difficulties the Treasury would encounter collecting payments, Morgenthau recommended that farm laborers, domestics, and firms with fewer than ten employees be excluded from coverage. “This was a blow,” Frances Perkins reported. “The matter had been discussed in the [Cabinet] Committee on Economic Security and universal coverage had been agreed upon almost from the outset.… The Ways and Means Committee members, impressed by the size of the project … nodded their heads to Secretary Morgenthau’s proposal of limitations. There was nothing for me to do but accept.” Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 297–298 (New York: Harper & Row, 1946).

^* Despite their rivalry Ickes and Hopkins shared a genuine affection for each other. “Harry was an agreeable scoundrel when he wanted to be,” said Ickes, who described his liking for Hopkins as “the liking of a man who had grown up under Scotch-Presbyterian restraint for the happy-go-lucky type who can bet his last cent, even if it be a borrowed one, on a horse race.” The fact is, both men were pragmatists and shared a common goal. The tension between them may have forced each to excel and produce results beyond what they might have achieved otherwise. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 93 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948). Also see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal 347 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960).

^* “I had great sympathy for Mr. Hopkins,” said Clay. “We knew what his task was. We felt that a public works program was not going to provide the necessary employment in itself, but Mr. Ickes did have a going organization and Mr. Hopkins did not. So we provided the basic elements of an organization for him, and a great many of the men we assigned to him became his lifelong friends.” Smith, Lucius D. Clay 63. (When Hopkins resigned as WPA director in December 1938 to become secretary of commerce, he was succeeded by Colonel Harrington.)

^* I vividly recall how my mother’s relatives living in northern Chickasaw County, Mississippi, received electricity in the spring of 1941, while our farm in the southern part of the county did not obtain it until 1946.