EIGHTEEN

LOW TIDE

Nothing is ever gained by trying to seek revenge in politics.

—JAMES A. FARLEY

FDR OVERPLAYED HIS HAND. To attack the Court was wrongheaded. To persist after the cause was won was petulant. Roosevelt paid dearly. Not only did he squander public support, but the Court fracas ruptured the Democratic party. Conservative Democrats and Republicans who made common cause to thwart FDR’s Court-packing plan found it easy to work together against other White House initiatives. The New Deal ceased to be a synonym for the Democratic party. From 1937 on, it was merely a movement within the party. Not all southerners were conservative, and not all conservative Democrats were from the South. But there were enough to give the anti–New Deal coalition a Dixie twang.

FDR’s legislative program was the first casualty. “Must” bills considered certain of passage at inauguration encountered heavy opposition. When the Court plan was defeated in July, five administration measures awaited action: wages and hours legislation, low-cost housing, reorganization of the executive branch, a revised farm program, and the creation of seven additional TVA-type regional authorities. When Congress adjourned at the end of August, only the Wagner Housing Bill had been enacted—a tribute more to Senator Wagner’s legislative skill than to White House support. Roosevelt recalled Congress into special session in November with a demand that action be taken, but the session proved a disaster. Despite unprecedented Democratic majorities in both Houses, not one additional piece of legislation was enacted. Only a year after his overwhelming election victory, FDR had lost control of the party.^*

Roosevelt stubbed his toe when Senate Democrats chose a leader to replace the revered Joe Robinson. The candidates were Mississippi’s Pat Harrison, chairman of the Finance Committee, and Alben Barkley of Kentucky, the assistant leader. Harrison was a fixture in Mississippi’s Democratic establishment, Barkley in the populist ranks of Kentucky. On policy issues there was little daylight separating the two. Both backed the New Deal, and both had supported FDR in the Court fight. Both had been for Roosevelt before Chicago. Barkley had given the keynote addresses at the 1932 and 1936 conventions; Harrison had given the keynote in 1924 and played a vital role keeping Mississippi in Roosevelt’s column on the crucial third ballot at Chicago in 1932. Harrison, one of the Senate’s Big Four, was considered a shoo-in.^1† Roosevelt promised not to intervene, as did party chairman Farley and Vice President Garner.²

As the senators prepared to vote, Roosevelt changed his mind. He liked Barkley more than Harrison and believed he would be easier to work with. “My dear Alben,” the president wrote in a lengthy letter the White House released, making clear where his sympathies lay.³ FDR used all the power at his disposal to influence the outcome. He placed a late-night call to Farley telling him to telephone Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago to instruct Illinois senator William Dieterich to vote for Barkley. When Farley refused, Roosevelt got Hopkins to make the call, and Dieterich, who was pledged to Harrison, switched sides. The White House also asked Kansas City’s Tom Pendergast to pressure freshman senator Harry Truman, and Pendergast dutifully made the call: “No, Tom,” said Truman, “I can’t.… I’ve made up my mind to vote for Pat Harrison and I’m going to do it.”⁴ A third waverer was Harrison’s fellow Mississippian, Theodore G. Bilbo. The Mississippi Democratic party was really two parties, one patrician, the other redneck, and Harrison and Bilbo represented opposing factions. The common denominator was white supremacy: both hated the party of Lincoln more than each other. Bilbo said he would vote for Harrison if Harrison would ask him. “Tell the son of a bitch I wouldn’t speak to him if it meant the Presidency of the United States,” said Harrison.⁵ Bilbo voted for Barkley. When the ballots were counted, Barkley beat Harrison by one vote, 38–37.

White House pressure had prevailed. But it was an empty victory. Roosevelt’s intervention reinforced the image of the president as deceitful and untrustworthy. Many on Capitol Hill resented FDR’s meddling in what was seen as a purely congressional matter—another example of executive overreach. “It is an encroachment on the prerogatives of the members of the legislative branch no President ought to engage in,” said Garner.⁶ Tactically, the move hurt Roosevelt. If he had remained neutral, most senators believed, Harrison would have won easily and FDR could have persuaded him, as he had Joe Robinson, to support most New Deal measures out of party loyalty.⁷ With Harrison now estranged from the administration, his position as chairman of the Finance Committee provided a powerful vantage point from which to derail or delay White House legislation. Barkley, for his part, would henceforth be known to Washington as “Dear Alben,” a creature of the president.

In the House, the situation was little better. Members, some of whom had come to Washington when the city’s streetcars were pulled by horses, resented the high-handedness of New Deal appointees as well as their intellectual arrogance. “Unless one can murder the broad ‘a’ and present a Harvard sheepskin he is definitely out,” grumbled Michigan congressman John Dingell.⁸ When Hatton Sumners, speaking to a crowded chamber, called on House Democrats to establish a new party leadership—implicitly reading Roosevelt out of the party—no one rose in the president’s defense. Not Sam Rayburn, who listened mutely to his fellow Texan’s rant; not Speaker Bankhead, who sat sphinxlike on the dais; not even Maury Maverick, the unofficial cheerleader for New Dealers in the House. “Nothing quite like it had occurred in that body for a long time,” observed The New Republic.⁹

Roosevelt was equally unforgiving. “The Supreme Court fight lived on in the President’s memory,” said Farley. “His attitude was that he had been double-crossed and let down by men who should have rallied loyally to his support. For weeks and months afterward I found him fuming against the members of his own party. Outwardly he was as gay and debonair as ever; inwardly he was seething.”^10*

FDR twitted Congress. He relished inviting members to the White House, cryptically suggesting that those who crossed him should be on guard. “I’ve got them on the run,” he told Farley. “They have no idea what’s going to happen and are beginning to worry. They’ll be sorry yet.”¹¹

Amid mutual recriminations between the White House and Capitol Hill, the country, as John Garner would have said, was going to hell in a handbasket. A rash of sit-down strikes in the spring and summer of 1937 polarized the political scene further. To some extent the strikes were the natural outgrowth of the Wagner Labor Relations Act, which afforded workers the right to join a union. Labor zeroed in on steel and auto production—the “Hindenburg Line” of American industry, in the words of CIO founder John L. Lewis—and the sit-down strike proved an effective organizing weapon. By seizing control of one plant that made a crucial part, striking workers could paralyze an entire company. In the case of General Motors, that plant was at Flint, Michigan. In 1937, General Motors was the world’s largest manufacturing corporation. With more than a quarter of a million employees, it produced half of all cars made in America. Yet the only set of dies for every GM model was on the floor at Flint. When workers there laid down their tools and refused to leave the plant, General Motors production slowed to a trickle. A company that built 50,000 cars in December 1936 produced only 125 during the first week of February 1937.¹²

Roosevelt was as surprised as anyone but refused to use force against the strikers. As he told Frances Perkins, “Well, it is illegal, but what law are they breaking? The law of trespass, and that is about the only law that could be invoked. And what do you do when a man trespasses on your property? You can order him off. You can get the sheriff to order him off.… But shooting it out and killing a lot of people because they have violated the law of trespass somehow offends me. I just don’t see that as the answer. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Why can’t these fellows in General Motors meet with the committee of workers? Talk it out. It wouldn’t be so terrible.”¹³

Michigan governor Frank Murphy saw it the same way. “I’m not going down in history as Bloody Murphy,” he told a friend. “If I send soldiers in on the [strikers] there’d be no telling how many would be killed.”¹⁴ Murphy also authorized state relief payments for the families of the strikers. When Garner pressed FDR about Murphy’s refusal to take action, Roosevelt held his ground. “It was the hottest argument we ever had,” said Garner.¹⁵

With the strike in its seventh week and with both federal and state authorities unwilling to use force, General Motors looked for a way out. Chrysler and Ford had boosted production to take advantage of GM’s shutdown, and Walter Chrysler had stolen the march by recognizing the United Auto Workers. “Leave General Motors guessing again,” he told Labor secretary Perkins.¹⁶

At Frances Perkins’s suggestion, FDR picked up the phone and called William Knudsen, the president of General Motors. A call from the White House, she said, would give Knudsen an excuse if he wanted to settle. Roosevelt had never met Knudsen but agreed to the gambit and laid on the charm: “Is that you, Bill?” he asked.

“I know you’ve been through a lot, Bill, and I want to tell you that I feel sorry for you, but Miss Perkins has told me about the situation you are discussing and I have just called up to say I hope very much that you will go through with this and that your people will meet with the [workers’] committee.”¹⁷

With FDR’s encouragement General Motors recognized the United Auto Workers as labor’s bargaining agent at its sixty factories in fourteen states. Other issues remained unresolved, but the central point had been won: General Motors recognized the union.

Big Steel followed close behind. The United States Steel Corporation (“Big Steel”), with 220,000 employees, produced more steel annually than Germany, the world’s second largest steel-producing country.¹⁸ For fifty years U.S. Steel and its predecessors had militantly resisted unionization. The Homestead massacre of 1892, in which ten Pennsylvania steelworkers were killed, was emblematic of the violence that beset the industry. The lesson of the General Motors strike at Flint was not lost on Big Steel. Anxious to avoid a repeat, Myron C. Taylor, the firm’s chairman, and John L. Lewis quickly came to an agreement that not only recognized the steelworkers’ union but granted a pay hike, a forty-hour workweek, and time and a half for overtime.

Lewis and the leaders of organized labor assumed “Little Steel” (Bethlehem, Republic, Youngstown, and the small firms throughout the country) would fall into line. But Tom Girdler, the gruff, union-busting head of Republic Steel, decided otherwise. Led by Girdler, Little Steel fought a determined rearguard action against unionization. The worst violence in modern labor history erupted on Memorial Day 1937, when South Chicago police opened fire on marchers at the Republic steel works, killing ten and wounding thirty others, including a woman and three children. Violence spread quickly. Two steelworkers were shot and killed in Youngstown, Ohio, on June 19, three in Massillon, eighteen in all during the summer of 1937, and Little Steel refused to budge. Emboldened by Girdler’s example, International Harvester, Westinghouse, Maytag, Allis-Chalmers, and the Big Four meatpackers refused to bargain with labor. Ford held out until 1941.

Much of public opinion soured on union tactics. When the organizational drive began, the majority of Americans were sympathetic. But the wave of violence that accompanied labor’s rising militancy caused many to draw back. Middle-class businessmen and professionals in particular were terrified by the sit-ins and demanded that government take action. A nonbinding Congressional resolution that declared the sit-down strike illegal cleared the Senate 75–3.¹⁹ Roosevelt was caught in the middle. Asked at his press conference on June 29 to comment on the fight between Little Steel and the CIO, the president repeated Mercutio’s line in Romeo and Juliet: “A plague on both your houses.”²⁰ FDR’s refusal to provide support drove John L. Lewis off the New Deal reservation: “It ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table … to curse with equal fervor … both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.”²¹ At the same time Lewis was castigating the administration, Roosevelt’s refusal to take sides alienated those who believed the president was implicitly condoning sit-down strikes and the accompanying assaults on private property. FDR could not win. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

Labor unrest contributed to the economy’s sudden collapse in 1937. But it was FDR’s misplaced decision to reduce federal spending that triggered the crisis. In the spring of 1937 American production pulled above pre-Depression levels for the first time. The New York Times’ Weekly Business Index reported output at 110—10 percent higher than in the corresponding week in 1929. Payrolls showed solid gains, and the steel industry was working at 80 percent of capacity. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had stood at 34 in 1933, had risen almost sixfold, to 190. Unemployment shrank to 12 percent, barely a third of the March 1933 percentage. Subtract the young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps together with those at work in the job creation programs of the PWA and WPA, and the unemployment figure stood at 4 percent.^22*

In June 1937 Roosevelt assumed that the economic battle had been won and slashed spending drastically. WPA activities were sharply reduced, farm subsidies curtailed, and public works pump priming eliminated. At the same time, Washington siphoned off some $2 billion in purchasing power in new Social Security taxes, and the Federal Reserve Board raised its reserve requirements for member banks by 50 percent, further reducing liquidity. FDR, a thrifty Dutchman at heart, believed it was time to balance the budget. The federal deficit for 1936 had been $4.3 billion. Roosevelt’s 1937 budget reduced that figure to $2.7 billion. Spending projections for 1938 showed the deficit at a mere $740 million, and by fiscal 1939 the budget would be balanced.²³

Such massive contraction was more than the recovering economy could sustain. On October 19 the New York Stock Exchange suffered its worst day since 1929. Waves of selling hit the market, pushing stocks to new lows. By the end of October the Dow Jones stood at 115, down 40 percent from its August high. Industrial activity declined more abruptly than at any other time in the nation’s history. By the end of 1937 steel production was down to 19 percent of capacity. The New York Times’ Business Index plunged to 85, wiping out all of the gains since 1935. Nightclubs and restaurants in New York failed; new autos clogged showrooms; gold fled the country.²⁴ Between Labor Day and Christmas, more than 2 million people lost their jobs, and another 2 million in the first three months of 1938. If the rate of decline continued through the year, the United States would lose almost two thirds of the gains since 1933.²⁵

The “depression within a depression” precipitated a sharp split within the administration. Morgenthau, Farley, and Commerce secretary Dan Roper urged FDR to stay the course, balance the budget, and adopt a more conciliatory stance toward business. As Morgenthau put it, the time had come “to strip off the bandages, throw away the crutches” and let the economy see if “it could stand on its own feet.”²⁶ Opposed were Hopkins, Ickes, Perkins, and Wallace, aided by Marriner Eccles of the Federal Reserve, who urged vigorous resumption of government spending. The downturn had occurred when federal expenditures had been reduced; it figured that a sharp increase in spending would reverse the momentum.

Just as in the struggle between the CIO and Little Steel, Roosevelt was caught in the middle. “It is clear that he is greatly disturbed … and doesn’t know which way to turn,” wrote Ickes after a cabinet meeting on November 6, 1937. “He is plainly worried.”²⁷

Like Hoover in 1930, Roosevelt temporized. “Everything will work out all right if we just sit tight and keep quiet.”²⁸ When Congress reconvened in January 1938, FDR did not mention the economic downturn. “As I see it,” said Morgenthau, “you are just treading water.”²⁹

“Absolutely,” said Roosevelt, who was always flippant when confronted with economic issues he did not fully comprehend. As James MacGregor Burns expressed it, “Roosevelt’s deficiencies as an economist were as striking as his triumphs as a politician.”³⁰

“The old Roosevelt magic has lost its kick,” chortled Hugh Johnson to the National Press Club. “The diverse elements in his Falstaffian army can no longer be kept together and led by a melodious whinny and a winning smile.”³¹

Meanwhile, the economy continued to deteriorate. On March 25, 1938, the stock market broke again, and virtually every economic index continued south. The price of farm products, which had held up well through 1937, joined the rout. Roosevelt was bailed out of his indecision by Harry Hopkins, who descended on the vacationing president at Warm Springs on April 2, armed with specific proposals for a massive spending program. Stung by continued press reference to the “Roosevelt recession,” FDR reluctantly jettisoned the balanced budget approach. “They have stampeded him,” Morgenthau lamented to aides at Treasury. “They have stampeded him just like cattle.”³²

On April 14 Roosevelt asked Congress for a special appropriation of $3.4 billion to revive the flagging economy. Hopkins would receive a $1.4 billion infusion for the WPA; Ickes, whose PWA had been liquidated some months before, would receive $1 billion for public works; and additional sums were allocated for slum clearance and low-cost housing, farm subsidies, and a small naval construction program. By the end of 1938 the United States had regained half the lost ground. Employment rose by 2 million, factory payrolls by 26 percent, and steel production by 127 percent. The downturn had been induced by the cutback in government spending FDR had ordered, and the recovery was delayed by his procrastination. When Roosevelt sought to pack the Supreme Court, he shot himself in the foot. When he prematurely curtailed federal spending in 1937, he shot the country in the foot.

Into FDR’s sea of troubles Senator Robert Wagner introduced antilynching legislation that was certain to create havoc in what remained of the New Deal coalition in Congress. James Byrnes called it “a bill to destroy the Democratic party.”³³ Richard Russell of Georgia said it was a piece of legislation designed “to lynch the last remaining evidence of States’ rights and sovereignty.”³⁴ As southern senators rose in opposition, Roosevelt ran for cover.

The lynching of African Americans by white southerners, if not a way of life, occurred with such disturbing frequency as to stain the fabric of the nation. Since 1933, eighty-three blacks—roughly seventeen a year—had been viciously put to death in the South. Lynchings were not merely public hangings but community ceremonies where frenzied men, women, and children inflicted unspeakable cruelty on their helpless victims—a shocking reversion to primitive brutality.³⁵

To satisfy states’ rights concerns, the Wagner bill did not make lynching a federal crime but would hold local law enforcement officials accountable. If a lynching went unprosecuted for thirty days, federal authorities could intervene and bring charges against the local officials responsible for the delay. Fines ranged up to $5,000 with possible imprisonment for five years.³⁶ Except for racist peckerwoods like Mississippi’s Theodore G. Bilbo, most southerners on Capitol Hill shared the nation’s shame and deplored the depravity lynchings entailed. For them the issue turned on states’ rights and the intrusion, even if one step removed, of federal law enforcement in what was seen as a purely local matter. Shades of Reconstruction colored that view—a festering memory kept alive by a steady stream of popular and scholarly writing, abetted by films such as D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.^* White supremacy went to the core of the issue, and no Washington incumbent from below the Mason-Dixon Line wanted to be “outniggered” in a Democratic primary.

Wagner had initially introduced his bill in January 1934, but the rush of New Deal legislation prevented it from being considered. In 1935 the threat of a southern filibuster kept it off the floor. Nineteen thirty-six was an election year, and the last thing Democrats wanted was a split in party ranks before November. When the Seventy-fifth Congress convened in January 1937, the bill seemed to have a fighting chance. Aside from unprecedented Democratic majorities in both houses (including many new members from outside the South), recent Gallup polls suggested that more than 70 percent of the public favored an antilynching law. Southerners were 65 to 35 percent in favor.³⁷ A ghastly double lynching in Duck Hill, Mississippi, in April in which two handcuffed black prisoners were chained to a tree, mutilated with blowtorches, doused with gasoline, and set afire underscored the urgency of the legislation. In the House, the southern leadership kept the bill buried in committee but a discharge petition (signed by 218 members) brought it to the floor, and on April 15 the bill passed 277–120, Speaker Bankhead and Majority Leader Rayburn voting against. In the Senate, the Judiciary Committee reported the bill favorably in June, too late for consideration at that session but at the top of the agenda come January.

Roosevelt stayed on the sidelines. “I did not choose the tools with which I must work,” he told Walter White, the secretary of the National Association for Advancement of Colored People. “Had I been permitted to choose them I would have selected quite different ones. But I’ve got to get legislation passed to save America. The Southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places in most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass.… I just can’t take that risk.”^38*

At his press conference in October 1934, FDR declined to endorse Wagner’s bill.³⁹ In 1935, when the bill faced a Senate filibuster, he refused to comment.⁴⁰ When Eleanor was invited to address an NAACP protest rally, Roosevelt counseled caution. “President says this is dynamite,” wrote Missy in longhand in the margin of the invitation. Eleanor did not go.⁴¹ In 1935 ER was invited to attend the closing session of the twenty-sixth annual convention of the NAACP in St. Louis. “FDR should I go?” she asked. Missy replied for the president that it would be best if she did not.⁴²In private conversation FDR said he thought the antilynching bill was unconstitutional,^† but the fact is he did not want to endanger what remained of his ties to the white South—especially to the southern oligarchs who controlled Congress.

Senator Wagner’s bill came before the Senate on January 6, 1938. For the next six weeks the upper chamber was immobilized, snarled in a southern filibuster, senators spelling one another round the clock. Twice Wagner moved for cloture to end the debate, and twice he was defeated. Roosevelt kept his hands off. At his press conference on January 14 he was asked whether he favored the bill. “I have not referred to it at all,” said FDR. “I should say there was enough discussion going on in the Senate.”⁴³ If Roosevelt had intervened decisively—perhaps if he had simply offered a word of encouragement—cloture could have been obtained and the bill passed. Yet he declined. To some it looked as if the filibuster had White House sanction. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP charged that there was a gentleman’s agreement to let the bill be talked to death. Most senators really did not want antilynching legislation “but would have to vote for it if it came up.”⁴⁴ On February 21, 1938, Senator Wagner withdrew the bill so the Senate could move on. In 1939, when the Seventy-sixth Congress convened, the bill was introduced again but failed to make it to the floor in either chamber. In 1940 it passed the House but was not taken up by the Senate. Then came the war.^*

During the twelve years FDR was president not one piece of civil rights legislation became law. No federal effort was made to abolish the white primary in the South or overturn the poll tax.⁴⁵ Roosevelt’s closest aides—Stephen Early, Marvin McIntyre, and Pa Watson—were southerners who shared the prejudice of the times. To the best of their ability they smothered controversial issues that might offend voters in the South. No effort was made to use the bully pulpit of the White House to advance the cause of racial justice.

That does not mean the Roosevelt administration was insensitive to the needs of African Americans. The segregation of government employees introduced by Woodrow Wilson was quietly set aside; blacks were employed in increasing numbers and at significantly higher levels of federal service— including the appointment of William H. Hastie as district judge for the Virgin Islands, the first African American to sit on the federal bench.⁴⁶

But it was at the symbolic level where the greatest strides were taken, and they were taken by Mrs. Roosevelt, not the president. When ER rose to fetch a glass of water for Mary McLeod Bethune, history was made.^† When Eleanor demonstratively placed her chair in the aisle between the white and black sections at a segregated conference in Birmingham, she rallied the spirits of African Americans throughout the country. “You would have to have lived in that era to know what kind of impact this had,” recalled the civil rights activist Pauli Murray.⁴⁷ When ER resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution to protest their refusal to allow world-famous contralto Marian Anderson to sing at Washington’s Constitution Hall, shock waves echoed through the country.

No incident did more to advance the cause of racial tolerance than the concert Marian Anderson performed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939. When the DAR refused to make Constitution Hall available, Sol Hurok, Miss Anderson’s manager, conceived the idea of an open-air concert at the shrine of the Great Emancipator. Secretary Ickes signed on, and FDR gave his approval. “Tell Oscar [Chapman, assistant secretary of the interior] he has my permission to have Marian sing from the top of the Washington Monument if he wants it.”⁴⁸ The Roosevelts were in Hyde Park that Sunday, but an integrated throng that stretched as far as the eye could see gathered to hear the great artist. Washington’s Afro-American called it “one of those rare occasions when caste is forgotten, when dignitaries rub elbows with street urchins, and when milady and her servant meet in the same social sphere.”⁴⁹ When Miss Anderson lifted her voice to sing “America,” democracy was redeemed. “It was more than a concert for me,” she said later. “It was a dedication. When I sang that day, I was singing to the entire nation.”⁵⁰ Six weeks later, at the invitation of the president, Marian Anderson performed at the White House dinner given for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

FRANKLIN AND ELEANOR continued to move in separate circles.^* ER was considerably ahead of the president in racial matters and equal rights for women, and was not always an asset in FDR’s struggles with Congress. “She is not doing the President any good,” wrote Harold Ickes, who could scarcely be described as unsympathetic to the New Deal. “She is becoming altogether too active in public affairs and I think she is harmful rather than helpful.”⁵¹

Roosevelt was tolerant if not supportive. “I can always say, ‘Well, that’s my wife; I can’t do anything about her.’ ”⁵² For her part, Eleanor made the best of it: “He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical. That I was never able to be.… Nevertheless, I think I sometimes acted as a spur, even though the spurring was not always wanted or welcomed. I was one of those who served his purposes.”⁵³

FDR’s relations with his children were another cause for concern. “One of the worst things in the world is being the child of a President,” he once said.⁵⁴ Anna, now married to the newsman John Boettiger, lived in Seattle and rarely came to Washington. Boettiger had resigned from the stridently anti-Roosevelt Chicago Tribune to avoid embarrassing the president, and he and Anna had been given a sweetheart deal by the media mogul William Randolph Hearst. Hearst and FDR disliked each other personally, yet they often needed each other and Hearst relished doing favors for the First Family. Boettiger was made publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at a salary of $30,000 a year plus a share of the profits, and Anna became editor of the women’s page at $10,000. The salaries were far in excess of prevailing pay scales but Hearst was buying White House goodwill. Various associates of FDR were disgusted at the arrangement, but neither Roosevelt nor Eleanor seemed concerned. “I shall miss them,” ER wrote Franklin, “but it does seem a grand opportunity.”⁵⁵

James, the president’s eldest son, and his wife, Betsey, lived in Boston, where James was in the insurance business. In 1936, evidently feeling the need for companionship, FDR summoned the couple to Washington and made James his naval aide with the rank of a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps. That was the rank FDR deemed appropriate, despite James’s lack of military experience. Eleanor disapproved. “Is James a 2nd Lieut. or Lieut. Colonel?” she asked.⁵⁶ When Louis Howe died, James became the president’s executive assistant and moved into the adjoining office. James was utterly unequipped to fill Howe’s role. Roosevelt got loyalty, but his son lacked judgment and experience. He made commitments in the president’s name without FDR’s knowledge and brazenly used his position for personal gain. William O. Douglas, then head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, reported a visit by James on behalf of a client with business before the SEC.⁵⁷ Douglas was so shocked that he went to the White House with his resignation. According to Douglas, FDR cradled his head on his arm and cried like a child for several minutes.⁵⁸

Public criticism of James became so shrill that he was forced to release his income tax returns. They disclosed nothing illegal, but media pressure was sufficiently intense that in mid-1938 the president’s son checked into Rochester’s Mayo Clinic with a perforated ulcer. A large portion of his stomach was removed, and James chose not to return to the White House. His marriage to Betsey Cushing was also on the rocks. FDR, who was very fond of his daughter-in-law (Betsey often served as White House hostess during ER’s travels), sent Harry Hopkins to dissuade James from getting a divorce, but to no avail. “I was hurt that Father had sent him instead of taking it up with me himself,” wrote James. “In retrospect, however, I have come to realize that Father felt he could not broach it to me—all his life, he had told us that he would advise us, if asked, but that our personal decisions were our own to make.”⁵⁹

After his recovery James married his nurse at the Mayo Clinic and moved to California, where he was hired by Samuel Goldwyn as a movie vice president, first at $25,000, then $40,000 a year. Hollywood buzz had it that James had been given a leaf-raking job by Goldwyn so he could boast to friends that the president’s son was on the payroll.^60* The fact is that Goldwyn was being sued by the Department of Justice for antitrust violations related to film distribution and saw James as a sheet anchor. “How can you do this with a suit pending?” FDR asked his son in December 1938. James said it was only a civil suit. “What is the difference between a civil and a criminal suit?” Roosevelt replied. “All I know is that you are working for a man who is fighting the United States Government.”⁶¹

Number two son, Elliott, was even more of a problem. A natural rebel, he objected to attending Groton, resisted confirmation in the Episcopal Church, and turned in a blank college entrance examination to avoid going to Harvard. Instead of college Elliott found a job with a New York advertising agency and earned enough to support himself but just barely. In 1932, at the age of twenty-one, he married Elizabeth “Betty” Donner, the attractive heiress to a Pennsylvania steel fortune. Betty’s father, a pillar in the Republican establishment, bankrolled the couple, provided them with a Park Avenue apartment, and invited Elliott into the family business as a vice president. “I saw my life laid out ahead of me,” he said later.⁶² Like his maternal grandfather and namesake, Elliott was restless. He and Betty and their infant son attended FDR’s 1933 inaugural, and four days later Elliott abandoned them and drove west. “He simply dumped them at the White House,” said an upstairs employee. Elliott told ER he needed to think things through. He had a job offer from a start-up airline in California. If it worked out, he might send for his family later.⁶³

Elliott ran out of money in Little Rock and placed a collect call to his father. FDR explained that he had closed the banks and suggested to Elliott that he find a prosperous-looking farm where he might earn enough to continue his trip.

“What road are you following?” FDR asked.

“Dallas, El Paso, Tucson,” said Elliott.

“Just go as far as you can,” Roosevelt replied.⁶⁴ Evidently FDR informed Jesse Jones, the Texas banker who headed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and Jones in turn alerted the Dallas business establishment. When Elliott arrived in the city, he was feted by the legendary C. R. Smith, the head of American Airlines, introduced to the moneybags of the Texas oil industry, Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison, and made grand marshal of the Fat Stock Show in Fort Worth. “I was vaguely aware that I was being sized up,” said Elliott.⁶⁵ He also met and immediately fell in love with Ruth Googins, the daughter of a wealthy meatpacking family.

Elliott continued to California. The fledgling airline for which he hoped to work went out of business shortly after his arrival, and he too was rescued by William Randolph Hearst, who engaged Elliott as aviation editor of the Los Angeles Examiner at the princely salary of $30,000. Two years later Hearst put him in charge of the company’s radio operations at $50,000.^* With Hearst’s offer on the horizon, Elliott decided to divorce Betty and marry Ruth. The easy way out was to break the news by telephone from the West Coast. The Donners were distraught; Franklin and Eleanor were appalled; and Anna was dispatched to counsel Elliott against the move. “See if you can’t keep him from rushing into it,” FDR instructed his daughter.⁶⁶ When Anna failed, Eleanor flew out to Los Angeles but had no better luck. Elliott divorced Betty in Reno in July 1933, and married Ruth Googins five days later.

Like James—perhaps even more than James—Elliott was always on the lookout for easy money, invariably trading on the family name. In 1934, while working as Hearst’s aviation columnist, he engineered a deal with the Dutch airplane designer Anthony Fokker to sell fifty Lockheed transports to the Soviet Union. Fokker was to convert the planes to bombers, and Elliott was to receive a $500,000 commission. The deal ultimately fell through (Elliott received $5,000), and the Nye Committee investigating the arms industry had a field day, particularly since Elliott had failed to report the $5,000 on his tax return.⁶⁷

By 1937 Elliott had assembled five radio stations for Hearst in the Southwest. When Hearst decided to sell the stations, Elliott was eager to buy them. To raise money, he reached out to old friends, business associates, and casual acquaintances, one of whom was John A. Hartford, president of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P). Elliott telephoned his father from Hartford’s office and then handed the phone to Hartford.

“Hello, John,” said FDR with his customary bonhomie. “While any business you have with my son must stand on its own merits, I will appreciate anything you do for him. And the next time you’re in Washington come and see me.”⁶⁸ Hartford was facing an antitrust suit filed by the Federal Trade Commission, and the president’s invitation was too good to pass up. He invested $200,000 and took Elliott’s personal note as collateral. Several years later, when Elliott’s radio empire ran into hard times, FDR asked then commerce secretary Jesse Jones for help. Jones interceded with Hartford, who agreed to settle the note for $4,000. Hartford told Jones he would do whatever the president asked. “Candidly, I would rather not have Elliott Roosevelt’s note in my estate after I am dead.”⁶⁹

FDR, Jr., son number three, was nineteen when his father became president. He graduated from Harvard in 1937 and promptly married Ethel du Pont, the stunning daughter of Eugene du Pont of Greenville, Delaware, a founding member of the Liberty League and a bitter opponent of the New Deal. Franklin, Jr.—known to the family as “Brud”—bore the strongest resemblance to his father and possessed the same charm and assurance. “He’s a good egg,” allowed Ethel’s father, “but it would be better if he had a different last name.”⁷⁰ FDR, Jr.’s, marriage to Ethel, the union of Roosevelts and du Ponts, was portrayed by the press as the wedding of the decade. The Army Corps of Engineers set up a field kitchen on the du Pont property, three companies of soldiers were deployed to provide security, and the receiving line required five hours to pass through. Among the guests of the du Ponts were the relief impresario Harry Hopkins, the feminist secretary of labor Frances Perkins, and the Jewish secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. FDR enjoyed every minute and, according to James, kissed all the bridesmaids. “It doesn’t really matter what you do,” cautioned Eleanor, “so long as you don’t steal the show.”⁷¹

In the autumn of 1937 Franklin, Jr., entered law school at the University of Virginia. Late in his first year, some fraternity jokers decided it would be a good idea to place a transatlantic telephone call to Premier Édouard Daladier of France, person to person from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. M. Daladier was not amused. After the French Foreign Ministry and the State Department finished exchanging notes, Roosevelt wrote his son:

As you know, there was a somewhat serious international flurry over the call that was put in from the Fraternity House on May 21st to Prime Minister Daladier.… It was, of course, purely a prank but I think it would do no harm for you to let them know at the Fraternity House that that kind of prank can have serious results!⁷²

John Aspinwall Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor’s youngest son, proved to be the tallest (at six feet, five inches), the most stable, and the most conservative. Unlike his brothers, he never ran for elective office and did not rely on his father’s influence for personal advancement. His marriage to the North Shore socialite Anne Lindsay Clark—they were married during John’s senior year at Harvard—lasted twenty-seven years, a record for the Roosevelt siblings, and he married only twice, another record. After finishing Harvard in 1938 he went to work as a clerk at Filene’s department store in Boston, earning $18 a week. John flourished in the retail trade and later owned and operated his own department store in Los Angeles. In 1953 he entered the investment banking business, where he prospered as well. Because FDR came down with polio when John was a toddler and was absent from the family much of the time, John had less emotional attachment to his parents and their political views than the other children. A closet Republican, he waited until after FDR’s death to announce his affiliation. He contributed generously to GOP candidates, publicly endorsed both Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, and when his brother FDR, Jr., ran for New York attorney general in 1954, John backed his Republican opponent, Jacob Javits.

In college during the 1930s, John attracted his share of attention. Visiting Cannes with classmates in the summer after his junior year, he and his friends joined the annual “Battle of Flowers,” when decorated floats competed for prizes. By the time their flower-bedecked carriage reached the reviewing stand in front of the Hotel Carlton, they had been drinking vintage Moët & Chandon for three hours and were snockered. When the mayor of Cannes, Pierre Nouveau, advanced to present the coach with a bouquet of flowers, John took a bottle of champagne from an ice bucket on the carriage floor and squirted him in the face with the contents. The incident generated wide press coverage, riled Franco-American relations, and required high-level diplomatic intervention to repair the damage.⁷³ John provided a ritual denial, and Ambassador William C. Bullitt offered what support he could. Franklin and Eleanor accepted John’s version, and ER met him at the dock in New York when he returned. As she put it:

If it had been one of my other boys I would have felt the incident was more than probable, for they have great exuberance of spirit. It just happens that John is extremely quiet, and, even if he had been under the influence of champagne, I doubt if he would have reacted in this manner.⁷⁴

The Roosevelt sons sought no special favors in World War II. James fought with Carlson’s Raiders (the Marines’ famous 2nd Raider Battalion) at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and the Solomon Islands, later commanded the Fourth Raiders, and earned the Navy Cross and a Silver Star. Elliott enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1940, flew three hundred photoreconnaissance missions, was wounded twice, and rose to command the 325th Photographic Reconnaissance Wing during the D-Day invasion. FDR, Jr., after graduating from the University of Virginia Law School, served in the Navy, commanded the destroyer Ulvert M. Moore, and won the Navy Cross, the Legion of Merit, and a Purple Heart. John, who was the last to enlist, saw combat as a lieutenant (later lieutenant commander) on the aircraft carrier USS Wasp in the Pacific, and earned a Bronze Star.

THE SECOND SESSION of the Seventy-fifth Congress was little more productive than the first. When members departed Washington sine die on June 16, 1938, only one significant piece of legislation had been enacted: the Fair Labor Standards Act, better known as the wages and hours bill. And it had been an uphill struggle. Introduced by liberal Alabama senator Hugo Black, the bill passed the Senate in July 1937. But a combination of conservative Republicans and southern Democrats (who feared the racial equality implications) kept the measure bottled up in the House Rules Committee until a discharge petition brought it to the floor in May 1938. After twelve hours of stormy debate and numerous amendments the bill passed with a lopsided majority of 314–7, only to run into the obstacle course of a House-Senate conference committee that sought to reconcile the newer House version with the bill the Senate had passed the year before. The final bill, reflecting the Hughes Court’s latitudinarian interpretation of the commerce clause, banned the employment of child labor and established a minimum wage of forty cents an hour, a forty-hour workweek, and time and a half for overtime.⁷⁵ It was passed by both houses on June 14—two days before adjournment—and the president signed it on June 24. “That’s that,” said FDR, with more finality than he intended. The Fair Labor Standards Act, one of the most important measures ever passed by Congress, would be the last significant New Deal initiative to become law.

Roosevelt’s frustration with the Seventy-fifth Congress led him to his third serious mistake. The Court-packing fiasco was the first; the premature cutback in federal spending the second; and his 1938 attempt to purge the Democratic party of dissident members of Congress was the third. Hard-core Republican opposition on Capitol Hill was taken for granted. What FDR could not forgive was the defection of conservative Democrats. The remedy he embarked upon was to oppose the renomination of key members of the House and Senate in upcoming Democratic primaries. It was a breathtaking departure from American tradition. No president since Andrew Johnson had intervened directly in individual congressional contests, and none since Wilson had made an off-year election a referendum on the presidency. Given the unhappy results in both instances, Roosevelt should have been forewarned.

FDR’s interest was piqued by the landslide victory in January of New Deal congressman Lister Hill, running for the Alabama Senate seat vacated by Hugo Black.^* Hill ran as an out-and-out supporter of the president, much as Black had been. His primary opponent was former senator Tom Heflin, an unrepentant racist from the red clay hills of eastern Alabama who had once shot a black man on a Washington streetcar.⁷⁶ Heflin had deserted the party over Al Smith’s Catholicism in 1928 and despite his populist, rabble-rousing past was backed by a significant portion of the state’s financial establishment. Hill beat Heflin 90,000 to 50,000—almost 2 to 1.⁷⁷

Initially FDR pursued the purge by proxy. As primary season approached, the White House asked Farley to draft a statement defining the administration’s position. Farley prepared the customary disclaimer proclaiming the Democratic National Committee’s neutrality: “As individuals, the members of the National Committee may have their favorites, but as a body the organization’s hands are off. These nominations are entirely the affair of the States or the Congressional districts, and however these early battles may result, the National Committee will be behind the candidate that the people themselves choose. This goes for every state and every Congressional district.”⁷⁸

Ten minutes after Farley’s draft statement arrived at the White House, James Roosevelt was on the phone. “Father has struck the last two sentences out,” he told Farley. The decision was made by the president on the spot. He was not lured into the purge by ideologue advisers; Hopkins’s thumbprints were not on it, nor had Corcoran hoodwinked FDR. The decision to intervene in the upcoming Democratic primaries was made by Roosevelt, and it was made in January 1938. “An albatross, not of my own shooting, was hung from my neck,” wrote Farley. “From that time on I knew no political peace.”⁷⁹

First up was Florida, where pro–New Deal senator Claude Pepper faced an uphill primary fight against Congressman J. Mark Wilcox of West Palm Beach, an ultraconservative member of the Florida business establishment who made opposition to the wages and hours bill the centerpiece of his campaign. Wilcox was a marvel on the stump, and prognosticators gave Pepper little chance. In the colorful rhetoric of the Sunshine State, Wilcox titillated backcountry audiences with rumors that Pepper had been guilty of celibacy before marriage and addicted to monogamy ever since.^80* On February 6, 1938, James held a press conference in Palm Beach, where he announced the White House’s support for Pepper in the primary. Thomas Corcoran, a Harvard Law School classmate of Pepper, funneled funds from private donors into the campaign, and on May 3 Pepper won an upset victory, beating Wilcox by 65,000 votes. Alabama and Florida made it two for two for the administration.

The next primary was in Iowa on June 7, 1938. FDR was determined to defeat incumbent senator Guy Gillette, a leading spokesman for midwestern farm interests who had made the cardinal error of opposing the president’s Court-packing plan. The fifty-nine-year-old Gillette, who had represented Iowa in the House before moving to the Senate in 1936, had supported most New Deal measures.⁸¹ But for Roosevelt the litmus test of party loyalty was the Court battle, and Gillette had been on the wrong side. Hopkins, an Iowa native, became the president’s surrogate. He convinced Congressman Otha Wearin to challenge Gillette in the primary, publicly endorsed Wearin (as did James Roosevelt), and mobilized whatever federal employees he could on Wearin’s behalf. All to no avail. Gillette enjoyed the support of the state organization; Agriculture secretary Henry Wallace—the most prominent Iowan in Washington—declined to support Wearin; and Gillette’s Senate colleagues rallied to his side. Taking aim at Hopkins’s role, Montana’s Burton K. Wheeler declared that “Congress in appropriating for the relief of the underprivileged never intended that these funds should be utilized to slaughter a member of this body.”⁸² Gillette won in a landslide, receiving more votes than his three primary opponents combined. “I will not,” he told Iowa voters, “be a rubber stamp member of Congress.”⁸³

Stung by Gillette’s victory, Roosevelt entered the fight himself. On Friday, June 24, having just signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, FDR devoted his second fireside chat of the year to an attack on the “Copperheads” in the Democratic party who resisted change.^* “We all know that progress may be blocked by outspoken reactionaries,” said Roosevelt. But those who posed as progressives and then voted against change were a more serious threat. “As head of the Democratic party … charged with the responsibility of carrying out the definitely liberal declaration of principles set forth in the 1936 Democratic platform, I feel that I have every right to speak in those few instances where there may be a clear issue between candidates for a Democratic nomination involving these principles.”⁸⁴

Roosevelt’s first stop was Kentucky, where Alben Barkley was in the fight of his life against the popular governor, Albert B. “Happy” Chandler (later commissioner of baseball). Farley advised hands off. “I am fond of both Barkley and Chandler,” he told FDR. “I wish they could both win.”⁸⁵ But the president was determined that Barkley be returned. Speaking to voters in Covington, Kentucky, on July 8, he devoted his entire address to praising Barkley’s liberal outlook and legislative experience. “I have no doubt whatsoever that Governor Chandler would make a good Senator,” said FDR. “But I think my good friend, the Governor, would be the first to acknowledge that as a very junior member of the United States Senate, it would take him many, many years to match the national knowledge, the experience and the acknowledged leadership in the affairs of the Nation of that son of Kentucky, of whom the whole Nation is proud, Alben Barkley.”⁸⁶

At the direction of the White House, Hopkins unlimbered the administrative apparatus of the WPA on Barkley’s behalf, and on primary day Barkley defeated Chandler easily.⁸⁷ The blatant involvement of the WPA (as well as Chandler’s use of state workers) triggered a senatorial investigation that culminated in the passage of the 1939 Hatch Act, barring political participation by federal employees. “These facts [in Kentucky] should arouse the conscience of the country,” said Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas, who chaired the investigation. “They imperil the right of the people to a free and unpolluted ballot.”⁸⁸

FDR identified ten senators he hoped to purge in the primaries. Gillette, the first to face the voters, won handily. Four were ultimately deemed too secure to challenge.^* One, George L. Berry of Tennessee, had gotten crossways of Memphis boss Ed Crump, and the Shelby County organization rendered the coup de grâce. Frederick Van Nuys of Indiana outmaneuvered his opponents and was renominated by acclamation at the Indiana Democratic convention on July 12. That left three in the president’s sights: Walter George of Georgia, “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, and Millard Tydings of Maryland. George had voted against the New Deal one third of the time since 1933; Smith almost half; and Tydings a whopping 77 percent—an opposition record among Democrats exceeded only by the eighty-year-old Carter Glass of Virginia, who was not up for reelection.⁸⁹ In the House, Roosevelt focused on the Rules Committee and targeted three members for defeat: John J. O’Connor of New York, Howard Smith of Virginia, and Eugene Cox of Georgia.⁹⁰

On August 11 FDR journeyed to tiny Barnesville, Georgia (1930 population 5,392) to dedicate a new rural electrification project. The little hamlet was jammed with more than 50,000 people who had come by car and wagon and pickup truck to see and hear their Warm Springs neighbor, the president of the United States. On the platform of notables with FDR were Senator George and his two primary opponents: Lawrence Camp, the young U.S. attorney from Atlanta who was the administration’s candidate; and the gallus-snapping, race-baiting Eugene Talmadge, the state’s former governor. Roosevelt wasted little time before he jumped into the primary fight. As an adopted son of Georgia, the president said, he felt “no hesitation in telling you what I would do if I could vote here next month.” The issue was liberal versus conservative. Senator George “is a gentleman and a scholar. He will always be my personal friend. [But he] cannot possibly in my judgment be classified as belonging to the liberal school of thought.” Roosevelt said he had known former governor Talmadge for many years. “I am very certain in my own mind that his election would contribute very little to practical progress in government.” FDR said his candidate was Lawrence Camp: “a man who honestly believes that many things must be done and done now to improve the economic and social conditions of the country.”⁹¹ When Roosevelt finished, he and George shook hands. “Mr. President,” said the courtly senator, “I regret that you have taken the occasion to question my Democracy and to attack my record. I want you to know that I accept the challenge.”⁹²

For the next month Walter George, a charter member of the Senate’s inner club, carried the fight to every crossroads and creek bottom in the state. Roosevelt’s intervention was “a second march through Georgia,” he told rapt audiences from Valdosta to Mountain City.⁹³ When the votes were counted, George won easily, with 141,235 to Talmadge’s 103,075. FDR’s candidate finished a distant third, with 76,778.⁹⁴

In South Carolina the race turned ugly. Smith was the Senate’s senior Democrat, elected when Taft beat Bryan in 1908. As longtime chairman of the Agriculture Committee, he had earned the sobriquet “Cotton Ed” for the solicitous care he bestowed on the South’s plantation economy. The political scientist V. O. Key, Jr., once said of Smith that he was “unrivaled as a critic of the New Deal, unmatched as an exponent of white supremacy, and without peer as a defender of southern womanhood.”⁹⁵ But Smith was long in the tooth and suffered from Potomac Fever—the disease endemic to legislators who spend too much time in Washington. Of all those earmarked by FDR for defeat, he seemed the most vulnerable. To challenge Smith, the administration convinced Governor Olin D. Johnston to make the race. Johnston announced his candidacy from the steps of the White House, and that gave Smith a tailor-made issue to excite the unreconstructed sentiments of his South Carolina constituents: Washington can’t tell the people of the Palmetto State how to vote! Arguing states’ rights and “New Deal Reconstruction,” Smith resorted to one of the most vicious racist campaigns in South Carolina history and beat Johnston by 10 percentage points.⁹⁶ Smith was asked after the election if Roosevelt was not his own worst enemy. “Not as long as I am alive,” he snapped.⁹⁷

FDR intervened most vigorously in Maryland. Of all those the president sought to purge, Millard Tydings was the most guilty of party disloyalty. Congressman David Lewis, the House sponsor of Social Security, was persuaded to contest the seat, and Roosevelt barnstormed the state over the Labor Day weekend with Lewis at his side. He spoke six times, never mentioning Tydings by name but making it clear that he considered Maryland’s senior senator a political turncoat. “Any man—any political party—has a right to be honestly ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal.’ But the Nation cannot stand for the confusion of having him pretend to be one and act like the other.”⁹⁸ Tydings, like George and Smith, made White House intervention the principal issue in the campaign. When the ballots were tabulated on September 13, Tydings defeated Lewis by 60,000 votes.

Roosevelt had taken on four senior Democratic senators and lost four times. In the House, both Eugene Cox from Georgia’s second district and Judge Howard W. Smith, who represented northern Virginia, were returned easily. FDR’s only victory in the 1938 purge campaign was the toppling of Rules Committee chairman John J. O’Connor in New York.^* Roosevelt put the best face on it. “Harvard,” he said, “lost the schedule but won the Yale game,” meaning that O’Connor’s removal from his powerful post more than compensated for the New Deal’s other defeats.⁹⁹

FDR’s intrusion into the primaries eroded his standing in Congress and further divided the Democratic party. Having put his prestige on the line and lost, Roosevelt placed New Deal candidates in jeopardy come November. Congressman Maury Maverick lost in Texas and Governor Frank Murphy went down in Michigan, as did George Earle in Pennsylvania. In New York the ticket won, but Governor Lehman’s margin of victory over Manhattan district attorney Thomas E. Dewey was less than 1 percent. Republicans picked up eighty-one seats in the House, took eight more in the Senate, and won thirteen governorships. Roosevelt was stunned. He told Farley he had expected to lose one seat in the Senate and perhaps sixteen in the House.¹⁰⁰ The Democrats retained control of Congress, but it was no longer the party FDR had led for the last six years. “We have a large majority,” said Garner, “but it is not a New Deal majority.”¹⁰¹

Roosevelt was a lame duck. Farley and Garner were taking presidential soundings, Hull was restless, and liberals scanned the horizon for a possible successor. If the downward momentum continued, the Republicans had their best shot at the White House since 1928. “Clearly,” wrote Washington newsman Raymond Clapper, “President Roosevelt could not run for a third term even if he so desired.”¹⁰²

^* Led by Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina—an early Roosevelt supporter—conservative Democrats used the special session to reach out to the GOP and draft a bipartisan ten-point “Conservative Manifesto” that denounced sit-down strikes, demanded lower taxes and a balanced federal budget, championed states’ rights, and defended private enterprise against government encroachment. As one historian has written, “The manifesto constituted a kind of founding charter for modern American conservatism.” David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 340 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

^† The other three were Vice President Garner, Joseph Robinson, and James Byrnes of South Carolina. See Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race 79 ff. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

^* FDR’s bitterness was directed at Congress, not the Court. “Hughes is the best politician in the country,” he told SEC head William O. Douglas with undisguised admiration. By 1938 whatever animosity there may have been between the president and the chief justice had been dissipated, and they continued to enjoy cordial personal relations. William O. Douglas, Go East, Young Man 327 (New York: Random House, 1974).

^* In his 2003 biography of FDR, Conrad Black took issue with the school of historiography that asserts that recovery in the United States lagged behind that of other industrial countries. As Lord Black points out, American unemployment figures did not distinguish between those who had no job whatever and those working for the WPA, in the public works program, or enrolled in the CCC. All were lumped together as “unemployed.” When the relief workers are factored in, American unemployment totals drop by almost 60 percent. “None of the other Western democracies,” writes Black, “provided so much or such original emergency relief employment as the United States did.” Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom 430 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003). Also see Black’s review article “No Bleeding Heart,” 5 Claremont Review of Books 27–29 (Spring 2005).

^* The history of Reconstruction became the life work of the historian William A. Dunning and the graduate students who studied with him at Columbia University. Their factually dubious but influential writing championing white supremacy determined the way many Americans see Reconstruction even today. For a critique of the “Dunning School,” see Jean Edward Smith, Grant 699–700 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

^* Thomas Corcoran put it more succinctly: political calculus took precedence over moral outrage; antilynching was too hot for FDR to touch. “He does his best with it, but he ain’t gonna lose his votes for it.” Corcoran, interview with Nancy J. Weiss, May 23, 1977, cited in Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR 119 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).

^† Roosevelt’s concern about the constitutionality of Wagner’s bill was not entirely misplaced. In United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876), the Reconstruction-era Supreme Court invalidated the operative sections of the Enforcement Act of 1870, which made it a federal crime to deprive any citizen of his or her constitutional rights. “The power of Congress to legislate does not extend to the passage of laws for the suppression of ordinary crimes within the States,” said Chief Justice Morrison Waite. Whether the Hughes Court, which was pacesetting in matters of civil rights, would have invoked, overruled, or distinguished Cruikshank is a matter for speculation.

^* On June 13, 2005, the Senate, by voice vote, formally apologized for its failure to enact antilynching legislation in the 1930s. “The Senate failed … our nation,” said Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, the chief Democratic sponsor of the resolution. The New York Times, June 14, 2005.

^† The incident occurred when Miss Bethune’s voice cracked while speaking at a benefit for Bethune-Cookman College. ER was on the platform and procured the water for Miss Bethune. “This is democracy in action,” said a black policeman at the event. “The wife of the President of the United States pouring a glass of ice water for a Negro woman who’s real black—she’s black as a black shoe.” Quoted in Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln 255.

^* “I realize more and more that FDR is a great man,” Eleanor wrote to her friend Lorena Hickok in October 1936. “[H]e is nice to me but as a person I’m a stranger and I don’t want to be anything else.” Quoted in Doris Faber, The Life of Lorena Hickok 221 (New York: Morrow, 1980).

^* “You and I know the average outsider does not receive such an offer,” wrote James many years later. “I was willing to take advantage of the fact that I was not the average outsider. I have always felt that, even if I accepted undeserved opportunity, if I worked hard to make the most of it on my own, any success I had would be deserved.” James Roosevelt, My Parents: A Differing View252 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976).

^* In contemporary figures, Elliott’s 1933 and 1935 salaries would be equivalent to $417,000 and $658,000, respectively. Considering the low tax rate of the period, the buying power would have been much greater.

^* Black was nominated by FDR on August 12, 1937 to replace retiring Supreme Court justice Willis Van Devanter. He was confirmed (63–16) on August 17 and took the oath of office on August 19. Black was the first of Roosevelt’s eight appointees to the Court.

^* In 1950 Pepper was defeated for reelection by Congressman George Smathers, who informed Florida voters that Pepper’s actress sister was “a practicing thespian living in New York’s Greenwich Village.”

^* “You will remember,” FDR told his radio audience, “that it was the Copperheads who … tried their best to make Lincoln and his Congress give up the fight, let the nation remain split in two and return to peace—peace at any price.” 7 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 395, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1941).

^* Alva Adams of Colorado; Pat McCarran of Nevada; Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri; and Augustine Lonergan of Connecticut. Clark had voted against the administration 42 percent of the time, Adams 36 percent, McCarran 35 percent, and Lonergan 21 percent. James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal 348–349 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967).

^* O’Connor, ironically, was the brother of FDR’s former law partner and confidant Basil O’Connor. In 1923 he succeeded to the House seat (the so-called silk-stocking district on the Upper East Side) formerly held by the legendary Bourke Cochran. After losing the Democratic primary in 1938, he contested the seat as a Republican (New York’s cross-filing provision permitted that) and in November was narrowly defeated for a second time.