PART II

The Soul of the Nation

1929  1937

18.

OF THE NEW INDUSTRIES OF THE 1920S, NONE SO CHARACTERIZED THE decade as advertising. Publicizing products had been an aspect of marketing for many years, but during the 1920s advertising took on a life and identity of its own. The American economy had lately crossed the historic divide between the age of scarcity, when the principal problem of economy was producing enough, and the age of surplus, when the problem was producing too much. For the first time in American history—and the first time in human history on such a broad scale—people had to be persuaded to consume all they collectively could produce. This was the challenge of America’s “New Era,” as its propagandists dubbed it, and it was the mission of advertising. “In the past, wish, want, and desire were the motive forces of economic progress,” Herbert Hoover declared to a conference of advertising executives. “Now you have taken over the job of creating desire.” Bruce Barton, the high priest of advertising, asserted, “Advertising is the spark plug on the cylinder of mass production…. Advertising sustains a system that has made us leaders of the free world: The American Way of Life.” Barton didn’t claim his craft was beyond reproach; nothing human was. “If advertising sometimes encourages men and women to live beyond their means, so sometimes does matrimony. If advertising is too often tedious, garrulous, and redundant, so is the U.S. Senate.” In other words, advertising was as human as love and as American as democracy.

Every modern industry, or at least every successful modern industry, heeded the advertising imperative, with many making products into their own advertisements. “Bathtubs appear in stylish shades,” one observer wrote. “Dishpans are no longer plain Cinderellas of fire and ashes; following a wave of the hand by the fairy godmother—style—they now appear resplendent in blues and pinks…. Automobiles change with the calendar. Last year’s offerings are made social pariahs; only this year’s model is desirable until it, in turn, is made out of fashion by next year’s style. Furniture, clothing, radios, phonographs, tumble from the fertile minds of scientists and designers and…drown the sales possibilities of products that already stagger with infirmity at the age of one year.”

The New Era battened on the institutionalized optimism that was advertising’s stock-in-trade—on the confidence that this year’s products would be better than last year’s, that this year’s sales would be greater than last year’s. Growth had always been the key to success in the American economy, but for most of American history the essential growth was growth in supply; in the age of scarcity, demand took care of itself. The titans of the nineteenth century—John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie—had focused on production, correctly confident that whatever they produced in oil and steel the American economy would consume. But as the country industrialized more fully, demand became the crux of the economic question, till in the New Era it emerged as the sine qua non of continued prosperity. If demand remained robust, the economy would thrive. If demand flagged, for whatever reason, the economy would slump. And demand depended on confidence: on the conviction, among others, that incomes would rise to support increasing purchases of all the goods the economy could produce.

Confidence could be self-fulfilling. If merchants expected sales to rise, they would expand their inventories by sending larger orders to suppliers, who would hire extra workers and invest in additional plant. The workers, with paycheck-swollen wallets, would become the customers for the merchants’ expanded inventories, in a virtuous circle with no obvious end.

Confidence was even more essential in another signature economic activity of the New Era: the buying and selling of securities. Wall Street had been the heart of the nation’s financial sector since the mid-nineteenth century, but in the decade after the World War the buying and selling of stocks and bonds became a national obsession. “Wherever one went, one met people who told of their stock market winnings,” a broker explained. “At dinner tables, at bridge, on golf links, on trolley cars, in country post offices, in barber shops, in factories and shops of all kinds.” A financial reporter, describing a popular form of pooled investing, declared, “Hardly a week now passes but a new investment trust appears on the horizon.” Before the war, the stock market had been a province of perhaps half a million investors; during the 1920s the province swelled to country size, comprising some fifteen million men and women who hoped their shares of the booming economy would make them rich. Stories of heretofore improbable success abounded: of the broker’s valet who heeded his boss’s tips and cleared a quarter million in profit, of the registered nurse whose bedside manner toward her well-informed patients earned her a quick thirty thousand, of the widow who took a flier in copper and landed the cash to pay off her mortgage, of the struggling young man who plunged into Niles-Bement-Pond and resurfaced with enough money to retire in style. The masters of investment became household words and cultural heroes; speculators like Samuel Insull, Jacob Raskob, and Billy Durant took the place on the front pages formerly occupied by industrialists Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Henry Ford. Everyone knew about bulls and bears; the terminology of the stock market infiltrated the larger language. To “sell something short” had originally meant to bet on a fall in price and carried no connotation of the outcome of the bet; during the 1920s, when short sellers consistently lost money—since everything was going up—it came to imply a mistaken judgment of something’s value.

Hard figures supported the euphoria that surrounded the stock market. The bull market of the New Era began in 1922 with the Dow Jones industrial average bumbling along below 80; by January 1929 the Dow had hurtled past 300. The future promised to be even brighter than the past. “Business is entering the new year upon a high level of activity and with confidence in the continuance of prosperity,” one respected forecaster averred. A prominent banker declared, “All major indications point to a prosperous coming year.”

Those indications included the recent election of a president who was every businessman’s dream and who embraced the New Era with enthusiasm. “One of the oldest and perhaps the noblest of human aspirations has been the abolition of poverty,” Herbert Hoover proclaimed in accepting the Republican nomination. “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us. We have not yet reached the goal, but, given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”

As voters overwhelmingly concurred that Hoover—rather than Al Smith—was the man to lead them farther into the New Era, Wall Street jubilantly seconded the opinion. The “Hoover market” of the autumn of 1928 lifted share prices to record levels. And in his inaugural address Hoover promised more of the same. “We have reached a higher degree of comfort and security than ever existed before in the history of the world,” he said. “Through liberation from widespread poverty we have reached a higher degree of individual freedom than ever before…. We are steadily building a new race—a new civilization great in its own attainments.”

“IT LOOKS LIKE I will have a man-sized job on my hands for the next two years,” Roosevelt wrote Archie Roosevelt, Theodore’s son, shortly after the 1928 election. Much of the job would consist of dealing with the Republicans who controlled the New York legislature and who, after the broad Republican sweep, were in a singularly unaccommodating mood. They considered Roosevelt’s narrow victory a fluke that would be rectified at the first opportunity and ought to be subverted till then.

Roosevelt addressed the hostile group in his inaugural speech on January 2, 1929. Agriculture remained the conspicuous exception to the boom of the 1920s; farm prices and incomes continued to lag. Roosevelt noted this and called for measures to elevate farm income till rural life became as materially attractive as city life. Hydroelectric power had been a contentious issue in New York state politics for years; the heart of the discord was whether hydropower sites should be developed publicly or transferred to private hands. Roosevelt came down firmly on the side of the former, telling the lawmakers that control of promising sites should “definitely remain in the people.” He advocated new laws protecting labor, including a “real eight-hour day and forty-eight-hour week” for women and children (the existing laws were often flouted), the extension of workmen’s compensation to cover occupational diseases (and not just accidents), the creation of a board to advise on minimum and equitable wages, the restriction of the use of injunctions by management against unions in labor disputes, and the establishment of an expert commission to advise on old-age security.

The chamber didn’t warm while Roosevelt was speaking. He hadn’t expected it to, and his conclusion conveyed promise but also a hint of warning. “The verdict on our relationship that I most desire from you,” he said, with a bared-teeth smile, “is that I have at least been fair and reasonable and friendly.”

The Republican lawmakers filed out of the assembly chamber frowning and proceeded to ignore essentially everything Roosevelt had said. He wasn’t surprised; in their position he might have done the same thing. But rather than hector his opponents, he devoted himself to cultivating his allies—or those who might become his allies. No Democrat could expect to govern New York without the aid of Tammany Hall, and though Roosevelt realized he would never enjoy the sidewalk credibility of Al Smith, he reasoned that he might bring Tammany around to his view of the needs of the state. Two weeks after his inauguration he headlined Tammany’s annual speakers’ bureau dinner. With nary a hint of past enmity, he thanked his “old friends” of Tammany for their support in the recent election. And he called upon the speakers’ bureau, in particular, to carry the worthy task forward. “Upon you rests the responsibility for the education of the voter in the aims and principles of the Democracy, not only of the city and the state but of the nation.”

Because the theme of the evening was political speaking, Roosevelt offered advice on this essential art. He reminded his listeners that in the early days of the republic, effective oratory had been crucial to political success. “Elections were won or lost, parties were driven out or swept into power entirely as the public speakers on one side or the other proved most able and convincing,” Roosevelt said. “It was the golden day of the silver tongue. With rare exceptions, the great public man had also to be classed as a convincing orator.” Things had changed as newspapers spread; voters learned to gather their information and take their cues from the daily papers. A powerful pair of lungs and a resonant set of vocal cords didn’t hurt the prospective office-holder, yet they were no longer necessary. The best speakers were often not the candidates themselves but the rally men, the functionaries appointed to whip up enthusiasm at gatherings of the party faithful.

The wheel continued to turn. Roosevelt predicted that radio would supplant the press as the primary means of connecting candidates to voters. Or reconnecting candidates to voters: Roosevelt saw the new technology as a return to earlier forms:

The pendulum is rapidly swinging back to the old condition of things. One can only guess at the figure, but I think it is a conservative estimate to say that whereas five years ago 99 out of 100 took their arguments from the editorials and the news columns of the daily press, today at least half of the voters, sitting at their own fireside, listen to the actual words of the political leaders on both sides and make their decision based on what they hear rather than what they read. I think it is almost safe to say that in reaching their decision as to which party they will support, what is heard over the radio decides as many people as what is printed in the newspapers.

This development was good news for the Democrats, who in most parts of the country had faced a skeptical, often hostile Republican press; it was even better news, though he didn’t mention it in his Tammany speech, for Roosevelt himself, who was becoming a master of radio. His mastery faltered on this occasion, though. He didn’t personally attend the meeting, held at the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan, but expected to have his voice transmitted from his office in Albany. The technology balked at the last minute, however, and a stand-in, New York supreme court justice William Collins, was summoned to read a telegraphed version of Roosevelt’s text.

Roosevelt took to the airwaves more successfully in the months that followed. The Republicans in the legislature refused to budge, obviously intending to sabotage Roosevelt’s administration and hoping to elect a governor of their own in 1930. Roosevelt berated them for putting party interests ahead of the welfare of the people. The Republicans had promised sound policies on the development of hydroelectric power, but “not a single move was made by the writers of this platform to put forward any program, sound or unsound,” he said. The Republicans had cast themselves as friends of labor, yet when the state labor commission recommended measures to improve the lot of workers, “the Republican leaders decreed the death of these bills and, then going still further, failed to continue the life of the commission.” Roosevelt had pressed the lawmakers on maximum-hour legislation, but “the Republican majority refused to allow the bills even to come to a vote.”

Roosevelt required time and practice to perfect the form of his radio addresses. Listeners to these early broadcasts thought he sometimes tried to communicate more information than the medium could readily handle. But the overall response was favorable, and he made his radio reports to the people of New York a regular part of his routine as governor.

He discovered something about radio he hadn’t realized at first: that it was particularly effective in the hands of the executive branch of government. Since the beginning of the century, political power had been shifting from the legislature to the executive. The trend was especially noticeable in Washington, where Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had made themselves the center of national political attention, but it applied in the states as well. The larger government grew, the greater the power wielded by the person who headed the government, either a governor or the president. At the national level, the emergence of the United States as an international power with global interests elevated the president still further, in that foreign affairs, to a much greater degree than domestic affairs, had always been the peculiar province of the executive.

Radio added a technological boost to the institutional trend toward greater executive power. Any legislature speaks with many voices, an able executive with one. In the nineteenth century, the many voices were often more effective than the one, since no voice carried farther than the physical sound waves generated by the speaker. But radio neutralized the advantage of multiplicity and in fact negated it. Radio allowed the single-voiced executive to communicate with a clarity that reduced the many-throated legislature to relative cacophony. A Roosevelt at the microphone could enter the homes of the millions of his listeners, forging a personal relationship that left even the most powerful legislators at an irretrievable disadvantage. Over time Roosevelt’s radio audience would come to feel they knew him as they had known no other executive; it was an aspect of his political genius, amplified by radio and sharpened by experience, that he made them think he knew them.

BY THE SUMMER of his first year in office Roosevelt had accomplished nothing of note in bending the Republican legislature to his will. The economy remained strong, and neither the leaders of the GOP nor their corporate supporters saw any reason to alter the conservative course that had served them well since the start of the decade. Roosevelt recognized what he was up against. “The business community is not much interested in good government,” he told a fellow Democrat. “And it wants the present Republican control to continue just so long as the stock market soars and the new combinations of capital are left undisturbed.” Some Democrats had been urging the party to shift to the right, to accommodate the mood of the New Era; Roosevelt preferred to stay the progressive course till the New Era ran out of steam. “Prevailing conditions are bound to come to an end some time,” he predicted. “When that time comes, I want to see the Democratic party sanely radical enough to have most of the disgruntled ones turn to it to put us in power again.”

He was preaching his radical patience in the summer and early autumn of 1929 as Wall Street bounded along in the seventh year of its bull market. The bounding grew more vigorous by the month; the daily swings of share prices, after averaging in the mid-single digits till mid-decade, had tripled by the end of 1928 and nearly doubled again during 1929. Stock pickers and stock watchers didn’t know what to make of it. Joseph Kennedy, one of the most successful of the speculators, thought things had gone too far when he stopped on Wall Street to have his shoes shined and received, in addition, advice to go long in oil and railroads. He determined at once to get out of the market, explaining to his wife that when a bootblack started offering stock tips, there was no room for professionals. Other pros—Bernard Baruch, Owen Young, David Sarnoff, apparently even Herbert Hoover—likewise liquidated their stock holdings. Baruch told Will Rogers to run for his life. “You’re sitting on a volcano,” the speculator quietly advised the humorist. “Get as far away as you can.”

An assortment of pessimists spoke publicly and loudly. Roger Babson, whose projections had won him a following during the previous years, told the National Business Conference that the sky was about to fall. “A crash is coming which will take in the leading stocks and cause a decline from 60 to 80 points in the Dow Jones barometer,” Babson declared at a moment when the Dow stood at 380. “Fair weather cannot always continue. The economic cycle is in progress today, as it was in the past. The Federal Reserve System has put the banks in a strong position, but it has not changed human nature. More people are borrowing and speculating today than ever in our history. Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific.”

But pessimists had been predicting the end of the bull market for years. Some had been disinterested in their forecasts of doom, while others, notably short-selling speculators, had been hoping to profit from a fall. Either way, they had been wrong. After each downward lurch, the market had resumed its climb, rising higher than before.

This explained the failure of most observers to absorb the full meaning of the events that began to unfold on Wednesday, October 23. Just after midday, for reasons no one could fathom, investors began to shed automobile stocks. Similar sell-offs had occurred many times since the beginning of the bull market, but in this case the selling continued longer than before, and it triggered unusual alarm. That the heaviest selling took place at the end of the day didn’t help matters, for it allowed nervous investors to spend the hours after the market closed poring over the ticker tape for signs of the direction stocks would take the next morning.

Market stalwarts professed undiminished confidence. Irving Fisher, a Yale economist, ascribed the recent gyrations to a “lunatic fringe of reckless speculation” and declared that the fundamentals of the market were as sound as ever. Share prices would recover quickly and would regain the “higher plateau” upon which modern efficiencies in production and distribution had rightly placed them. Rumors circulated that the big banks, doubtless assisted by the Federal Reserve, would flood the market with liquidity to ensure that leveraged investors not be caught out.

The jawboning had worked in the past, but this time it failed. Again for reasons no single person could entirely fathom, the market collectively panicked. By the opening bell on Thursday, October 24, the orders to sell were already backlogged beyond the ability of the staff of the stock exchange to process them. The logjam intensified the panic, as investors realized, with prices falling, that each minute that an order went unfulfilled signified that much deeper a loss. The bull market had been built, to an unprecedented degree, on borrowed money, with many lenders free to call in their loans should the value of their collateral—the shares the loans purchased—decline. As the prices fell, the lenders called their loans, forcing the investors to sell. The glut of sell orders depressed the price further, prompting new loan calls, and the virtuous circle that had lifted share prices as the bubble expanded suddenly turned vicious. Market volume broke previous records by 50 percent; the informal “curb market,” outside the exchange itself, nearly doubled its previous largest day. The ticker ran hours behind, leaving sellers uncertain how badly they had been wounded. The normally circumspect New York Times described Wall Street as a war zone. “Wild-eyed speculators crowded the brokerage offices, awed by the disaster which had overtaken many of them,” the paper declared. It proceeded to detect a sign of hope amid the debacle, relating reports of a banker bailout and recounting the assertion of the city’s big financial houses that the market remained sound in the face of this “technical” correction. (Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan & Co. attributed the falling prices to “air holes” in the market.) The Times put particular emphasis on some last-minute buy orders, especially in steel. “The tide had turned,” the paper proclaimed.

Other voices joined the hopeful chorus. “We believe that present conditions are favorable for advantageous investment in standard American securities,” one large brokerage informed its customers and the broader public. Herbert Hoover called a special press conference to offer his personal reassurance. “The fundamental business of the country, that is, the production and distribution of commodities,” the president said, “is on a very sound and prosperous basis.”

The bullish rhetoric appeared to pay off on the Friday after what already was being called “Black Thursday.” Prices held steady and actually gained a bit on average; volume was healthy but not outlandish. In that era the market operated half-time on Saturdays, and this second day after the debacle proved almost boring. Brokers and the staff of the exchange caught up on their sleep on Sunday; the cleaning crews removed the last signs of the Thursday disaster.

Then on Monday, from causes no more explicable than those of Thursday, the bottom fell out of the market once more. This time blue-chip stocks suffered most grievously, driving the Dow Jones average farther down than it had ever plunged in a single day. The market’s hall of fame was transformed into a hall of horror; U.S. Steel lost 17 points, Union Carbide 20, Westinghouse 34, General Electric 47. The liquidation continued on Tuesday, and it took the especially unnerving form of block trading—sales of ten thousand shares, twenty thousand, fifty thousand—which suggested that banks and other financial institutions, far from riding to the rescue of the market, were fleeing. Volume on Bloody Tuesday surpassed that of Black Thursday; by the close of business that day, the Dow had lost 30 percent in less than a week. The broader New York Times index fared even worse, plunging 40 percent.

WHAT IT ALL MEANT, none could say. If the carnage continued, investors would suffer still more, to their dismay and, in some cases, dissolution. But the investing class, while larger than ever in American history, remained a distinct minority of the American people. Fifteen million men and women owned stock—which meant that seventy million didn’t.

The critical question was whether Wall Street’s swoon would prostrate the larger economy. Past financial panics had sometimes spilled over into commerce and industry, but sometimes not. The current panic was the worst in American history, but that might simply have been because the bull market that preceded it was the largest and longest in history. With luck—and astute leadership in key parts of the political economy—the damage to the stock market might be contained. If the economy’s fundamentals were as sound as Hoover asserted, America’s hundreds of thousands of non-financial businesses, and their tens of millions of employees, might be spared the fate of the suffering investor class.

The effect of the stock crash on the broader economy was the most important question facing the country in the late autumn of 1929, but a related question was the effect of the crash, and whatever ensued, on the fortunes of the major political parties. The crash placed Franklin Roosevelt in a delicate position. He had long believed, and had been saying quietly, that the Democrats wouldn’t return to power until the bloom fell off the rose of the Republican economy. The stock crash certainly singed the tips of the petals, and it suggested that additional wilting might be in store. Roosevelt the politician—the presidential hopeful—could hardly help thinking that the worse the economic news, the better his prospects of finally following Uncle Ted into the White House. But no politician who aspired to the presidency—and certainly not the governor of the state whose largest city was the capital of the American financial industry—could afford to be caught showing the slightest satisfaction at the misfortunes of investors. Privately, Roosevelt might dream of what the ill tidings portended, but publicly he had to hope the stock market recovered and the damage didn’t spread.

In speeches and in comments to the press, Roosevelt adopted the position that the current difficulties confirmed the need for the progressive reforms he had been advocating since the beginning of the decade. He traveled to Chicago in December to address a gathering of Illinois Democrats. His appearance was partly in support of Democratic candidates for the 1930 congressional elections; it was also in the service of his own ambitions, as a test of the western waters for the 1932 presidential race. This, at any rate, was the interpretation the delegates from eighty-two Illinois counties, mostly rural, placed on his appearance, and by the evidence of their lusty chorus of “East side, west side, all around the town,” they liked what they saw and heard. Roosevelt reviewed a half century of American history, declaring it an era of unexampled progress “in the liberation of the individual from the drudgery of the daily struggle for existence.” Unfortunately, the benefits of progress had not been evenly shared. Agriculture trailed industry, largely because farmers had been denied the benefits of combination that amplified the productivity of manufacturers and because they had suffered from a high tariff and other measures that protected industry at agriculture’s expense. Until now the weakness of the farm sector had affected the farm sector almost alone, leaving city dwellers indifferent to their rural compatriots’ plight. But such a situation couldn’t persist. America was in “a state of unstable equilibrium,” Roosevelt asserted. “And nothing can remain in that condition for long.” Roosevelt blamed the Republicans for robbing the farmers, and he called on the Democrats to defend them. If the Democrats did so, he predicted, they would be rewarded at the polls.

OF COURSE, for Roosevelt to be considered for president in 1932, he had to be reelected as governor in 1930. New York’s short cycle had been designed to keep elected officials accountable to voters; in the process it dictated deadlock when one party controlled the legislature and the other party the governorship. Both Roosevelt and the Republicans looked to the 1930 elections to break the deadlock—he with growing confidence, they with mounting trepidation.

The half year after the stock crash revealed that the damage would not be confined to the financial sector. For seven fat years the stock market had risen on the confidence that pervaded the economy as a whole. Market watchers perceived an intimate connection between share prices and business activity. “The stock market and business are more closely allied than at any time in history,” the Wall Street Journal declared in early 1929. “You cannot have prosperity with a protracted decline in stocks. Neither can you have an advancing market with business on the decline.” When written, these words were intended to justify the high prices for stocks; after the stock prices collapsed, they became a prophecy of depression.

The Great Depression of the 1930s was hardly the consequence of the stock crash alone. In certain respects, both resulted from the unstable condition of the larger economy. Agriculture’s troubles were well known, but other sectors were not much stronger. A bubble in Florida real estate had burst amid a hurricane in 1926; the escaping pressure flattened much of the residential construction industry. Auto sales had been sluggish for some time; Henry Ford sobered observers by declaring that the industry was substantially overbuilt. Banking labored under its chronic dependence on the confidence of depositors; should anything shake that confidence, even the most responsibly run bank would be at risk.

Nor were the sources of instability confined to America. For decades, but especially since the World War, American finance had been intimately entwined with European finance, rendering American banking houses vulnerable to the missteps and follies of their transatlantic counterparts. Whether mere misstep or full-blown folly, the decision of Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, Winston Churchill, to put Britain back on the gold standard at the prewar exchange rate had the most far-reaching effects. Churchill’s decision ignored the fundamental changes the war had wrought in the world economy; it overvalued the pound and undervalued the dollar, making American exports cheap and draining Britain’s financial reserves westward across the Atlantic. Benjamin Strong, the governor of New York’s Federal Reserve Bank and the de facto leader of the Federal Reserve system, did what he could to rectify the situation, slashing American interest rates and thus making the dollar less attractive to overseas investors. But the lower interest rates fueled the stock speculation that inflated the Wall Street bubble, limiting Strong’s ability to counter the pernicious consequences of Churchill’s exercise in imperial nostalgia.

Strong watched the bubble grow, with concern but not alarm. He understood the risks but believed that he and the Federal Reserve had the tools to deal with emergent crises on Wall Street. “The very existence of the Federal Reserve System is a safeguard against anything like a calamity growing out of money rates,” he declared. “We have the power to deal with such an emergency instantly by flooding the Street with money.” Perhaps the Fed did have the power, but after the untimely death of Strong in 1928, it lacked the nerve. It lowered interest rates modestly after the stock crash, but skittish investors simply interpreted the reduction as a signal that the Fed, too, had lost confidence in stocks and that worse days were coming. They unloaded still more of their stocks. The flood of liquidity Strong had promised never amounted to more than a trickle, and as investors went into hiding, the nation’s money supply shrank by as much as one-third. Prices fell commensurately, crushing debtors, who had to repay their obligations with dearer dollars, and discouraging producers from expanding, or even maintaining, output.

America’s elected officials did little to alleviate the troubles, and more than a little to aggravate them. Congress and the White House weighed in during the summer of 1930 with the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which tried to protect American jobs and profits by doubling the average duty on imports. “I do not assume the rate structure in this or any other tariff bill is perfect,” Hoover said on signing the measure. “But I am convinced that the disposal of the whole question is urgent…. This provision is a progressive advance and gives great hope of taking the tariff away from politics, lobbying, and log-rolling.” The president asserted that the tariff was “largely directed to the interest of the farmer,” and he predicted that farmers would especially benefit. He added the hopeful conclusion that “with returning normal conditions our foreign trade will continue to expand.”

Hoover was wrong on all counts, except for his admission that the tariff wasn’t perfect. The Smoot-Hawley tariff wasn’t progressive but regressive, undoing even more of what the Democrats had accomplished by way of freeing trade during the 1910s. It represented the triumph of politics and lobbying, winning passage over the published objections of hundreds of distinguished economists. The rhetoric of concern for farmers provided the cover for Congress to ratchet up the rates on numerous manufactured goods. Foreign trade did not expand, nor business conditions return to normal; instead the new American tariff triggered a beggar-thy-neighbor economic war among the great powers that impoverished them all and punished American farmers especially.

19.

AS THE STOCK MARKET CONTINUED TO SLIDE DURING 1930, AND AS the larger economy began to track Wall Street’s downward course, Democratic candidates became more viable than they had been for nearly a generation. The Democrats in 1930 gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the World War, and they cut deeply into the Republican majority in the Senate.

And in the state race that everyone was watching, they—or rather Franklin Roosevelt—smashed the Republicans with an authority that gave heart to Democrats nationwide and pause to all Republicans. New York was something of a microcosm of the country as a whole, its upstate farmers suffering from the same low prices as farmers elsewhere, and its urban workers getting laid off in proportions comparable to those of other American cities. Roosevelt registered sympathy but at first accomplished little to ease the pain of his suffering fellow New Yorkers. Yet no one really expected him to do much, in part because of the opposition of the Republicans in the legislature, in part because it didn’t occur to people to look to Albany for solutions to what was clearly a national problem. Roosevelt rode the dissatisfaction to victory by the astonishing margin of 730,000 votes, or twice the previous record plurality in New York history.

Roosevelt’s triumph was personally satisfying, and it augured important changes in the direction of New York politics. But the larger significance wasn’t lost on observers in the Empire State or beyond. “The tremendous vote for Governor Roosevelt was regarded as increasing greatly his chance for the Democratic nomination for President in 1932, for which he is known to be an aspirant,” the New York Times explained on its front page the morning after the election.

Roosevelt hardly bothered to deny his intentions. For the record he declared that he had his hands full governing New York, but he declined to disavow the efforts of others to put his name forward. And he undertook actions designed to elevate his visibility among voters in the country at large. Some moves were subtle. He employed his powers as governor to direct monies to the construction of the Theodore Roosevelt Hall at the Museum of Natural Science in New York City. More than a decade after the Rough Rider’s death, voters could be excused for forgetting that TR had been a Republican nearly all his political life; what stuck in the public mind was the connection between the Roosevelt name and a bold, progressive approach to national problems. Franklin Roosevelt was happy to encourage the connection and remind people that things had been better when a Roosevelt ran the country.

Roosevelt played the other side of the progressive street as well. Woodrow Wilson’s star remained in eclipse, but holdover Wilsonians still wielded influence within the Democratic party. Roosevelt reached out to Wilson’s old confidant Edward House, a Texan with considerable pull among the Democrats’ southern wing. The initial gesture was a simple request for advice. Roosevelt sent Louis Howe to visit House with a draft letter responding to a query from supporters; Howe asked House for help revising and sharpening the reply. House had long looked askance at Roosevelt, and even more so at Howe, but on this occasion he was pleased. “It is a joy to cooperate with him,” House wrote Roosevelt regarding Howe. “We never have any arguments and have no difficulty in reaching conclusions satisfactory to us both.” House proceeded to promote Roosevelt in Texas and the South, particularly among former supporters of William McAdoo and the late William Jennings Bryan. House’s efforts didn’t erase all southern suspicions of the New York governor, but they prevented any alternative candidate from gaining traction in Dixie.

Roosevelt worked the West through another proxy. James Farley had been the New York state Democratic chairman before becoming Roosevelt’s 1930 campaign manager, and before that he had been Al Smith’s fair-haired Irishman. Smith appointed Farley boxing commissioner, a post that earned him sufficient fame that Lucky Strike paid him to endorse its cigarettes. Farley might have become a rival to Louis Howe among Roosevelt’s supporters, except that where Howe was a policy man at heart, for whom politics was a means to the end of progressive policy, Farley preferred his politics unsullied. The game was what mattered to him, not the final score. Outsiders often expected Farley to be as brusque as the streets of New York, but in fact he spread the charm of the Irish, adapted to local circumstances, wherever he went. Louis Howe thought he was the ideal person to send west. “He has a wholesome breeziness of manner and a frank and open character which is characteristic of all Westerners,” Howe remarked. “In addition, I think he gives a distinct impression of being a very practical and businesslike politician.”

The Westerners thought so, too, at least enough to register their advance approval of a Roosevelt candidacy. On an eighteen-state tour that carried him from Lake Superior to Puget Sound and then south to California and back across the Great Basin and Plains to Chicago, Farley talked up Roosevelt and the need for party unity and listened intently to Democratic committee members, state chairmen, newspaper editors, potential delegates, and anyone else who might influence the outcome of the 1932 convention. Some were coy, others forthright. William Howes of South Dakota was both. “Bill was a canny politician who had been in the game for years, usually working hard for the Democratic ticket only to see it go down under a Republican landslide on election day,” Farley remembered. “He knew the game backwards and forwards. We sat there for some time exchanging generalities, without disclosing what either of us really had in mind. Just before it was time to go, Bill decided to let me know what he really thought. He plumped his fat fist on the table and growled in a deep voice: ‘Farley, I’m damned tired of backing losers. In my opinion, Roosevelt can sweep the country, and I’m going to support him.’”

Similar comments from other Democrats caused Farley to conclude that the West was Roosevelt’s for the taking. “I am satisfied, Governor, that the leaders want to be on the bandwagon…. There are a lot of Democratic candidates for governor and state offices who believe there is a real chance of winning with you as the nominee, and they feel there is absolutely no hope if anyone else is named.”

THE EAST WAS another matter. Had Roosevelt been a Republican—or, rather, had the Democratic party operated the way the Republican party did—his approach to the 1932 nomination would have taken the form of a victory parade many months before the convention. But the Democrats’ two-thirds rule meant that a determined minority could hope to stall the candidacy even of a person favored by an otherwise overwhelming majority of delegates. The eastern wing of the party included elements opposed to Roosevelt for various reasons. Economic conservatives of the Grover Cleveland school thought him unreliable on fiscal and business issues. Philosophers of the party considered him shallow. Supporters of Al Smith resented the eclipse of their man by his erstwhile protégé.

Smith himself tried to hide his resentment but didn’t succeed. In December 1931 Clark Howell, the publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, visited Smith at his office in the newly completed Empire State Building. Howell and the Constitution had supported Smith at some cost to their credibility in the South, and Howell thought his loyalty had earned him an expectation of candor. “He seemed glad to see me,” Howell wrote Roosevelt after the interview with Smith. “For a few minutes we indulged in generalities, and then I got down to business.” Howell wanted to know how Smith would respond to a Roosevelt candidacy. “Governor,” Howell said, “you hold in the palm of your hand the assurance of an overwhelming Democratic victory next year, or you are in a position where you could jeopardize the present prospect of sure success.”

“How?” Smith inquired.

“By your attitude toward Franklin Roosevelt. With your support of him, all opposition to him will vanish, and his nomination will be a mere formality. The country expects you to support him, and it will not believe that you can possibly do otherwise.”

“The hell I can’t!” Smith burst out. He quickly added, “I do not mean that I will not support him.” But he refused to give Roosevelt or anyone else a blank check. “I am for the party first, above any man, and I will support the man who seems best for the party.”

Howell explained why he thought Roosevelt was the best man.

“But you speak for the South,” Smith replied. “You don’t understand the situation up here as I do.”

Howell asserted that Roosevelt would sweep the South and probably three-quarters of the states west of the Mississippi.

“But that is not this section,” Smith countered.

“With your support it is,” Howell responded. He listed the states—New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey—that Roosevelt could easily carry.

Something was eating at Smith. Howell probed to find out what it was. “Governor,” he said, “is there any ground for personal hostility on your part against Roosevelt?”

“No,” Smith answered slowly. “He has always been kind to me and my family, and has gone out of his way to be agreeable to us at the mansion at Albany.” While saying this, Smith rose from his desk and began pacing. “But, do you know, by God, that he has never consulted me about a damn thing since he has been governor? He has taken bad advice, and from sources not friendly to me. He has ignored me!” Smith suddenly slammed his hand down on the desk. “By God! He invited me to his house before he recently went to Georgia, and did not even mention to me the subject of his candidacy.”

Howell explained that Roosevelt wasn’t officially a candidate and didn’t want to put Smith in the awkward position of having to answer questions about something Roosevelt hadn’t yet revealed to the public. Smith refused to be mollified. He complained that Roosevelt’s “damn fool friends” were doing him and the party more harm than good. He ended by saying that he was, at the moment, neither for nor against Roosevelt and that he would take his time deciding what to do.

WHILE ROOSEVELT pondered how to deal with Smith, he confronted the task of governing the largest state in America in the throes of its worst depression in history. His tools were distinctly limited. He had no control over monetary or trade policy and only marginal influence on taxes, and hence could do nothing about the causes of the depression. He was left to deal with its effects. His first priority was relief: government assistance to those left hungry and homeless by the layoffs that continued to spread from shop to shop, factory to factory, industry to industry. Roosevelt’s political philosophy, like that of most of his progressive generation, had been shaped by the generally good times of the early decades of the twentieth century, when the chief function of government, in the progressive view, had been to restrain the excesses of American capitalism. Busting trusts, capping rail rates, ensuring the safety of food and drugs, protecting the nation’s natural resources: these had been the progressives’ priorities. It hardly occurred to the progressives that government someday might have to sustain, rather than restrain, capitalism and to supplement the incomes of large numbers of people caught short by its collapse.

Nor did this fully occur to Roosevelt yet. But the floundering economy caused him to reconsider the purpose of government and to reconfigure his basic philosophy. “What is the state?” he asked a special session of the New York legislature, which he called in the summer of 1931 to address the needs of the swelling population of unemployed. “It is the duly constituted representative of an organized society of human beings, created by them for their mutual protection and well-being.” Roosevelt’s definition wouldn’t have passed muster in any introductory political science class, ignoring those tyrannies and oligarchies that had other aims than the protection and well-being of the people. But he wasn’t addressing a political science class, and his description suited his legislative purpose, which was to get the New York senate and assembly to appropriate funds for unemployment relief. “The duty of the state toward the citizens is the duty of the servant to its master…. One of these duties of the state is that of caring for those of its citizens who find themselves the victims of such adverse circumstance as makes them unable to obtain even the necessities for mere existence without the aid of others. That responsibility is recognized by every civilized nation.”

Here again a picky listener might have taken issue with Roosevelt’s formulation. Most of the countries of Western Europe had recognized the responsibility of the state to support the people in time of distress, but the question inspired heated debate in America. In the 1880s Grover Cleveland had vetoed a bill promising government payments to drought-stricken Texas farmers, on the ground that the measure would foster dependence on the government’s dole. “Though the people support the government,” Cleveland asserted, “the government should not support the people.” Cleveland’s position remained popular almost fifty years later, and though most Americans had come to accept the idea of government relief for certain natural disasters—hurricanes, floods, earthquakes—many Americans, maybe most, had yet to be convinced that business cycles qualified.

Roosevelt therefore had to exert himself to persuade the New York legislators to act. “The economic depression of the last two years has created social conditions resulting in great physical suffering on the part of many hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children,” Roosevelt told the lawmakers. “Unless conditions immediately and greatly change, this will, we fear, be aggravated by cold and hunger during the coming winter.” Some observers were looking to the federal government for help. Perhaps the Hoover administration and Congress would act, but even if they did, there was no way of knowing when the help would come. “The State of New York cannot wait,” Roosevelt told the lawmakers.

He proposed the creation of a new agency empowered to deliver relief as rapidly as possible to the people who most needed it. The “Temporary Emergency Relief Administration”—soon shortened to TERA—would find or create jobs for the unemployed, and where jobs couldn’t be provided it would furnish food, clothing, fuel, and housing to the unemployed. Under no circumstances would cash—a dole—be given to individuals. Beyond this, however, the TERA should be granted “the widest latitude and discretion” in apportioning $20 million in emergency funds.

The Republicans grudgingly gave Roosevelt the money and authority he wanted. He appointed Jesse Straus, of the R. H. Macy department store chain, to head the TERA. Straus understood how large organizations operated and gave the relief agency credibility for care in not wasting taxpayers’ money. But he knew little about delivering social services. For this expertise Roosevelt turned to a chain-smoking wraith of a man who headed, ironically, the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association. Harry Hopkins was a prototype of the modern social worker, having caught the progressive spirit at Grinnell College in his home state of Iowa and spun it into a career on New York’s Lower East Side, not far from where Eleanor Roosevelt had made an avocation out of similar sentiments. He worked in child welfare and later civilian relief during the World War. Meanwhile he discovered a penchant for politics, of both the labor and partisan varieties. He helped found the American Association of Social Workers in the early 1920s and campaigned for Al Smith for governor and president. In the 1928 campaign he encountered Franklin Roosevelt, who appreciated his passion for social work, his aptitude for politics, and his ability to function on less food and sleep than anyone Roosevelt knew.

Hopkins infused the TERA with his energy and commitment, but the agency hardly dented the distress the sinking economy was visiting upon New York. By the end of 1931 some 1.5 million New Yorkers were out of work and the initial appropriation of $20 million had been spent. Roosevelt returned to the legislature and asked for more money, to be raised by a $30 million bond issue. His measure was submitted to the voters in a referendum and approved.

WHILE THE NEW money was being disbursed, Roosevelt acknowledged what political observers had taken for granted at least since his overwhelming reelection in 1930: that he was a candidate for president. “It is the simple duty of any American to serve in public position if called upon,” he wrote the secretary of the North Dakota Democratic party in January 1932. Party officials in that state wished to enter Roosevelt in their primary. “I willingly give my consent,” he declared, “with full appreciation of the honor that has been done me.”

Roosevelt proceeded to explain what his candidacy entailed. In radio addresses and in person he spoke, as he put it, on behalf of the “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” For too long, he said, government had operated for the benefit of the wealthy, consigning the poor to the margins of public life. The Hoover administration had responded to the crisis by furnishing aid to big banks and corporations. This approach was characteristic of the Republicans, Roosevelt said, and characteristically wrong. It treated ordinary men and women as secondary to the powerful firms that had long dominated American life. And it certainly hadn’t done anything to alleviate the depression, which grew worse with each passing month. Roosevelt advocated “building from the bottom up,” as he put it: supplying aid to those who most needed it. He also urged a reduction in the tariff. The Smoot-Hawley impost, far from protecting American industry, had devastated it, as even Republicans should have realized it would. If American factories ran anywhere near capacity, they would produce more than Americans by themselves could consume. “We must sell some goods abroad,” Roosevelt asserted. But foreign countries could acquire the dollars to purchase American goods only by selling their products in America. “This foolish tariff of ours makes that impossible.” The crisis before the country was far greater than the Hoover administration understood. “We are in the midst of an emergency at least equal to that of war,” Roosevelt declared. “Let us mobilize to meet it.”

Hoover was an easy target during the spring of 1932. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the embodiment of the president’s trickle-down approach, had achieved little. Yet Hoover was constrained from taking stronger measures by his own self-help philosophy and by the simple fact that he was president and therefore responsible for American welfare in a way Roosevelt wasn’t. Roosevelt, the outsider, could paint the depression in all its grim detail, and even embellish where he thought embellishment would serve his purpose. Hoover had to soft-pedal the country’s problems, knowing that a declaration of emergency might frighten people and make conditions even worse than they already were.

Roosevelt recognized his advantage and pushed it hard. “Two weeks ago I said that we were facing an emergency more grave than that of war,” he declared at a Jefferson Day dinner in St. Paul, Minnesota. “This I repeat tonight.” He may well have been right, but he didn’t help matters by reminding Americans how frightened they should be. “A great fear has swept the country,” he said. “Normal times lull us into complacency. We become lazy and contented. Then with the coming of economic stress we feel the disturbing hand of fear. This fear spreads to the entire country, and with more or less unity we turn to our common government at Washington.”

So Roosevelt said, and so he hoped—at any rate about the turning to Washington. There were plenty of Americans who saw no compelling reason to look to the federal government, who accepted the Republican preference for relative inaction by government and for reliance on the business cycle to restore prosperity, if slowly. Yet Roosevelt could see that their number was shrinking and that the patience of America was wearing thin. His political strategy was based on a belief that America’s patience would wear out by November 1932.

In Atlanta in May he offered the clearest view of where he intended to take the country should he be elected president. His commencement address at Oglethorpe University was longer on substance than many such speeches, and the graduates, most wondering how they would find jobs in an economy already oversupplied with workers, listened carefully. “As you have viewed this world of which you are about to become a more active part,” Roosevelt said, “I have no doubt that you have been impressed by its chaos, its lack of plan. Perhaps some of you have used stronger language. And stronger language is justified.” Lack of planning was the bane of the modern American economy, which regularly produced tremendous waste. Some of the waste was the necessary consequence of technological change, Roosevelt granted. “But much of it, I believe, could have been prevented by greater foresight and by a larger measure of social planning.” The depression revealed the extent of the waste. “Raw materials stand unused, factories stand idle, railroad traffic continues to dwindle, merchants sell less and less, while millions of able-bodied men and women, in dire need, are clamoring for the opportunity to work.”

Experts and amateurs adduced various causes for the depression, Roosevelt said, and they prescribed remedies that followed from their explanations. Some blamed the business cycle and counseled patience to let the cycle turn further, to renewed prosperity. Others looked backward to the World War and outward to the international economy and advocated rescheduling debts and reparations and manipulating exchange rates and currency flows.

Roosevelt didn’t deny that the business cycle and the larger world influenced American affairs, but he urged his listeners to look within the American economy, in particular at the lack of balance between producers and consumers. While corporate profits had soared during the 1920s, wages grew by far less, and farm prices stagnated. The excess profits piled up in the corporate coffers till they spilled into the stock market, with results that became painfully apparent in October 1929. Under a saner system, the benefits of modern technology and the productivity it yielded would have been shared more evenly. “It is well within the inventive capacity of man, who has built up this great social and economic machine capable of satisfying the wants of all, to insure that all who are willing and able to work receive from it at least the necessities of life.” Roosevelt didn’t quite say that government should be the guarantor of jobs for all those willing and able souls—which was what he was later accused of saying—but he came fairly close. “It is toward that objective that we must move if we are to profit by our recent experience.” Nor did Roosevelt suggest specific routes to his goal. These would emerge in the fullness of time.

Yet he did describe what would become the characteristic method of his administration. Unsurprisingly—Roosevelt being a politician, and this being a political speech—he attributed his approach to the genius of the American people. “The country needs—and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands—bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

THE CLOSER THE Democratic convention drew, the more inevitable a Roosevelt nomination appeared, and the greater the scrutiny the presumptive nominee experienced. By the early 1930s Walter Lippmann had been the most influential observer of the American political scene for perhaps a decade. He had helped found the New Republic in the year Woodrow Wilson entered the White House, and he assisted Wilson in negotiating an end to the World War at Paris in 1919. He was a progressive at heart but considered himself a pragmatist; he also considered himself a shrewder judge of American politics and policy than any American politician or policy maker. From his desk at the New York Herald Tribune he offered counsel to parties and voters and handed down verdicts on candidates. In January 1932, following Roosevelt’s announcement for president, Lippmann assessed the New York governor.

“The art of carrying water on both shoulders is highly developed in American politics, and Mr. Roosevelt has learned it,” Lippmann declared. Roosevelt’s feat, Lippmann explained, consisted in attacking and defending the status quo simultaneously, declaring the need for fundamental reforms even while disclaiming any such intent. Lippmann had to admire Roosevelt’s ingenuity, but he was at a loss as to what the governor actually stood for. “It is not easy to say with certainty whether his left-wing or right-wing supporters are the more deceived. The reason is that Mr. Roosevelt is a highly impressionable person, without a firm grasp of public affairs and without very strong convictions.” Certain of Roosevelt’s supporters called him a dangerous enemy of those malign forces that currently afflicted America; Lippmann dismissed such descriptions as laughable. “Franklin D. Roosevelt is an amiable man with many philanthropic influences, but he is not the dangerous enemy of anything. He is too eager to please. The notion, which seems to prevail in the West and South, that Wall Street fears him, is preposterous…. Wall Street does not like some of his supporters. Wall Street does not like his vagueness and the uncertainty as to what he does think, but if any Western Progressive thinks that the Governor has challenged directly or indirectly the wealth concentrated in New York City, he is mightily mistaken.” Roosevelt’s record as governor revealed a penchant for brave words rather than bold deeds. “I doubt whether anyone can point to a single act of his which involved any political risk.” The keepers of the status quo needn’t worry about Roosevelt. “Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.”

LIPPMANN’S DISMISSAL encouraged Al Smith to step in front of the Roosevelt train. Smith still smarted at what he considered Roosevelt’s flippant treatment of him; he also chafed at his own bad luck in peaking too soon. George Van Schaick, a Smith ally whom Roosevelt had made superintendent of insurance, tried to nudge Smith toward an endorsement of Roosevelt. Smith responded with a litany of complaints against Roosevelt that turned into an angry postmortem of the 1928 campaign. “He became quite heated,” Van Schaick said. “He reviewed the campaign against him based largely on his religion and spoke very bitterly of the narrowness and bigotry which had developed in certain sections. He spoke with deepest feeling…. He said that having been defeated on such narrow and un-American grounds in 1928, that now in 1932 when it was quite likely an auspicious Democratic year, all should stand aside and give him another chance to overcome the prejudice he had faced in 1928. He said further that FDR should recognize it and not attempt to take the nomination away from him.”

Smith wasn’t so candid in public, but he adopted a strategy designed to deny Roosevelt the nomination and reclaim it for himself. Two weeks after Roosevelt tossed his hat in the ring, Smith issued a statement:

If the Democratic National Convention, after careful consideration, should decide it wants me to lead, I will make the fight; but I will not make a pre-convention campaign to secure the support of delegates. By action of the Democratic National Convention of 1928, I am the leader of my party in the nation. With a full sense of the responsibility thereby imposed, I shall not in advance of the convention either support or oppose the candidacy of any aspirant for the nomination.

It was a shrewd maneuver, one Roosevelt might have admired if it hadn’t come at his own expense. Smith, standing on the disputably high ground of a nomination that had proved to be the worst disaster in the Democrats’ recent history, absolved himself of endorsing Roosevelt and implicitly invited party conservatives to launch a stop-Roosevelt offensive at the convention. Smith knew perfectly well how the two-thirds rule worked; the opponents of the front-runner merely had to impugn his inevitability and hold out till the convention grew exhausted and desperate. At that point the convention could well turn to one who had carried the banner before. The Happy Warrior might take the field again.

ROOSEVELT DETERMINED to forestall such an outcome, by a strategy exactly along the lines of what Walter Lippmann criticized. Anyone could see that the depression had opened the door for the Democratic candidate in the general election; the only thing the candidate had to do was to avoid missing the opening by veering too far to the left or the right. Balance was the key to victory, and if balance required placating both progressives and conservatives, Roosevelt was willing to oblige.

Balance required care and effort, though. On two issues, a Democratic candidate might easily misstep. The first was Prohibition, which wasn’t quite as divisive in 1932 as it had been in 1924 and 1928 but still evoked passions. The sentiment in favor of an embargo on alcohol continued to erode with the undeniable failure of the federal government to enforce the law at all thoroughly and with the increasing need of the states for tax revenues to replace what the depression had cost them in sales and income taxes. Yet Prohibition remained symbolically powerful in the rural parts of the country, a last stand against the otherwise irresistible tide of modernity.

Roosevelt initially attempted to straddle the issue. He supported repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment but without vigor or even, for many months, voice. While other Democrats staked out their positions, he kept mum. Walter Lippmann held Roosevelt’s silence against him, as further evidence of his lack of leadership. Al Smith was even more annoyed. With the 1932 election approaching, Smith wanted Roosevelt to join him in a cultural war on those who had voted against him four years earlier, with repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment being the test issue. “Why in hell don’t he speak out?” Smith demanded of Clark Howell, in the interview with the Atlanta Constitution publisher. Smith knew that Roosevelt privately opposed Prohibition. “Now ain’t the time for trimming.”

That Smith could say such a thing made clear—to Howell and, more significantly, to Roosevelt—why he had lost so badly in 1928 and why he mustn’t win the nomination in 1932. Not in sixteen years had the stars been so favorably aligned for Democrats; to risk victory by taking a provocative, party-splitting stance on Prohibition would be the height of folly. The Eighteenth Amendment was as good as dead anyway; the movement for repeal hardly required Roosevelt’s support. On the contrary, the good of the party—and of the country, Roosevelt could reasonably extrapolate—required just the trimming that so angered Smith.

Eventually Roosevelt broke his silence on Prohibition. In February 1932 he called for a return of the liquor question to the states, that they might tolerate or continue to prohibit alcohol as they saw fit. This agnostic position, favoring repeal of the federal amendment but allowing states to impose their own bans, placed Roosevelt midway between the wets and the drys. He added a rationale that made his compromise even less controversial: he stressed repeal as a fiscal measure, promising a “large source of additional revenue” to those states that loosened the taps and bungs but taxed what they spouted.

The other issue that threatened to divide the party and derail Roosevelt’s advance to the nomination was the appropriate attitude toward the world beyond America’s borders. Remnant Wilsonians wanted Roosevelt to reembrace the central teaching of their departed philosopher-president: that America and the world were irretrievably interconnected. In 1932 the Wilsonians were still calling for American membership in the League of Nations, at this point primarily as an acknowledgment of the global, or at least transatlantic, character of the depression and a first step toward discovering international remedies. Roosevelt seemed a natural to join such a call, having been an ardent Wilsonian and currently castigating the Republicans for the economic nationalism behind the Smoot-Hawley tariff. But internationalism raised hackles on the neck of middle America, precisely that portion of the electorate that had abandoned Smith in such hordes in 1928. To woo them back into the party required reassurances from Roosevelt that he wouldn’t put the interests of Europeans or other foreigners ahead of American interests.

Roosevelt couldn’t easily rewrite the past, and he didn’t try. “In common with millions of my fellow countrymen, I worked and spoke, in 1920, in behalf of American participation in a League of Nations,” he admitted in early 1932. “For that course I have no apology to make.” Had present circumstances recapitulated those of that earlier time, he said, he would be working just as hard for American membership in the League. “But the League of Nations today is not the League conceived by Woodrow Wilson.” Roosevelt let listeners imagine that things might have been different if the Republicans hadn’t sabotaged Wilson’s vision for the League. Had the United States been a member all these years, the League might have evolved more positively. But there was little to be gained by arguing the point. The League was now an instrument for the advancement of the narrow and often nefarious purposes of the European powers. “Therefore I do not favor American participation.”

HAVING DODGED, as he hoped, the bullets of Prohibition and internationalism, Roosevelt advanced toward the convention. A generation after the progressives had specified primary elections as the ideally democratic way of narrowing candidate fields, the Democratic party chose the delegates to its national convention by a combination of primaries, caucuses, state conventions, and backroom back-scratching. Roosevelt’s political labors of the previous decade—his correspondence with state Democratic officials, his cultivation of William Jennings Bryan and Edward House, his convention appearances, his dispatch of Louis Howe and James Farley to consult with southern and western party leaders—had been undertaken with this welter of decision-making in mind, and during the spring and summer of 1932 his efforts paid off. He won an early lead in delegates, and his advantage widened with each passing month.

But he left nothing to chance. He continued to woo southern Democrats especially, hosting events at Warm Springs designed to make this Hudson Valley Dutchman seem a Scots-Irish son of Dixie. He engaged Huey Long, the Louisiana senator, in a good-natured argument about the proper method of eating corn pone with potlikker. “Because I am at least an adopted Georgian, I am deeply stirred by the great controversy,” Roosevelt wrote the Atlanta Constitution. “I suggest referring the whole subject to the platform committee of the next Democratic National Convention.” Yet after Long announced for dunking, Roosevelt couldn’t remain silent. “I crumble mine,” he declared.

Several weeks before the convention nearly all the South had climbed aboard the Roosevelt bandwagon. Texas and Virginia were the main exceptions, holding out, respectively, for favorite sons John Nance Garner, the speaker of the House, and Harry Byrd, the governor of the Old Dominion. The West was equally enthusiastic, with almost every state but California, where Garner won the primary, pledging for Roosevelt.

Only the East occasioned worry. Al Smith’s partisans joined others intent on stopping Roosevelt, and the alliance campaigned hard in New England, where it captured Massachusetts for Smith and split the rest of the region with Roosevelt’s forces. Smith’s backers fought Roosevelt to a draw in New York.

The result was that Roosevelt entered the Chicago convention with a commanding lead over Smith but not a decisive one, given the party’s two-thirds rule. Roosevelt toyed with trying to repeal the rule, which would have allowed a first-ballot victory, but he rejected the idea as suggesting a lack of confidence. He concentrated instead on wooing Garner, whose Texas and California delegates could put Roosevelt over the top.

Garner at first refused to budge. Having attended conventions since the turn of the century, the wily Texan understood that strange things happened once the balloting began. Smith might stymie Roosevelt but be unable to win himself; the convention might turn to Garner in the belief that any Democrat could defeat the wounded Hoover.

The first ballot went as expected. Roosevelt received 666¹/4 votes, substantially more than half but some hundred shy of two-thirds. The second ballot, which was called at once—as dawn began to break outside the Chicago convention hall—was the crucial one, for it would show movement. If Roosevelt gained ground, he could count on victory. But if he slipped, he might lose everything. Roosevelt stayed away from the convention, as candidates did in that era, but Farley worked the hall on his behalf and secured eleven additional votes. Smith meanwhile lost six votes. Roosevelt’s men sighed with relief and encouragement, Smith’s with frustration and foreboding.

A third ballot brought Roosevelt five more votes and cost Smith an additional four. At this point Garner had to make a decision. If he held out too long, Roosevelt might win on his own, leaving Garner with nothing to show for his success in Texas and California. But if he threw his support to Roosevelt too soon, he would give up whatever—admittedly slim—chance he had of winning the nomination for himself. His delegates were committed to him for the duration. William McAdoo, the former candidate who now headed the California delegation, told Sam Rayburn, Garner’s floor manager, “We’ll vote for Jack Garner until hell freezes over if you say so.”

Garner decided not to wait that long. He refused to risk an extended battle that might spoil the Democrats’ first good shot at the White House in sixteen years. As he later recalled, “I said to Sam, ‘All right, release my delegates and see what you can do. Hell, I’ll do anything to see the Democrats win one more national election.’”

Garner’s concession proved the difference. The switch of Texas and California prompted other states to follow suit, and on the fourth ballot Franklin Roosevelt received the Democratic nomination.

20.

REXFORD TUGWELL MET ROOSEVELT AT THE GOVERNOR’S MANSION in Albany, and one of the first things he noticed was the shoes. “Curiously unworn,” was how Tugwell described them. This shouldn’t have been curious at all. Everyone in New York who cared to know realized that Roosevelt didn’t walk. Not everyone appreciated the extent of his disability, which he continued to minimize. But no one had seen him strolling the sidewalks of Albany or Manhattan, and no one expected to see him. A man who didn’t walk didn’t wear out shoes.

Yet Tugwell still found it curious, for it belied the broader impression of the man. Tugwell taught economics at Columbia University, with a specialty in the business of agriculture. Roosevelt learned about him through Raymond Moley, a Columbia colleague from the political science department who had been advising the governor on prison reform. Roosevelt decided to pick the brains of experts on a variety of subjects important to a prospective president. Moley brought Tugwell up from the city on the afternoon train; they arrived at the mansion in time for dinner.

Eleanor Roosevelt commenced the personal talk. She quickly learned that Tugwell came from Chautauqua County and that his family had been farmers, mostly dairy and fruit. His father had run a business on the side.

Roosevelt pushed the conversation toward public policy. He had long thought that one solution to the unemployment problem was to encourage jobless city dwellers to relocate to the country. What did the professor think?

Tugwell disagreed. Farming was a complex affair, he said. City folks wouldn’t know where to start. And country life was different from city life. They would probably be bored and unhappy.

Roosevelt responded—“a little testily,” Tugwell thought—that at least they would have something to eat.

Tugwell didn’t admit even that. They wouldn’t have something to eat unless they could grow it themselves, and most would be unable to do so.

The discussion continued, but Tugwell found himself unable to take his eyes off Roosevelt. As the dinner ended, the governor rolled his wheelchair from the dining table to the living room, talking all the while. Without dropping a syllable or pausing for breath, he transferred himself easily from his wheelchair to the sofa. Tugwell thought the conversation provided a cover, a disguise for his disability. “The talking was calculated,” Tugwell recalled. “His crippled legs must have led to the invention of many such diversions, finally becoming unconscious.”

The sofa sat low to the floor, and Roosevelt’s legs projected high and forward. He occasionally moved them by putting his hands under his knees and shifting them manually. “When he did this, enormous shoulder muscles bunched under his jacket and relaxed smoothly,” Tugwell wrote. “It occurred to me that, during the eleven years of his struggle to get back the use of his legs, the rest of his body had really become overdeveloped. I wondered what his jacket size must be. I imagined that if Roosevelt had not worn custom-made clothes, he probably could not have found his size in most stores.”

Roosevelt’s large head and thick neck matched his shoulders and torso, yet somewhat oddly. Tugwell could understand how the exercises Roosevelt had done for rehabilitation had developed the muscles of his upper body, but he wondered what exercises had enlarged his head. He had seen pictures of the young Roosevelt, the lean athlete. Something of that younger man remained in the figure seated before him—“immobile but still athletic.”

Roosevelt’s face was as interesting as his body. “It was a mobile and expressive face,” Tugwell said. “It might have been an actor’s.” Tugwell afterward mentioned this to Moley, who agreed. “He said it was an actor’s, and a professional actor’s at that. How did I suppose he’d created and maintained the image of authority?”

Tugwell was taken a bit aback. He asked Moley if the Roosevelt he had spent the evening with wasn’t, then, the real Roosevelt.

Moley reflected before answering. His explanation stuck with Tugwell, who recalled it years later:

Yes, he said, in the sense that all this paraphernalia of the governorship had become part of him. It was a real talent; it was a lifetime part that he was playing…. He’d figured out what he ought to be like in order to get where he wanted to get and do what he wanted to do, and that was what was on display. Ray added, thoughtfully, that no one would ever see anything else.

Moley had been studying Roosevelt for some time. His sessions with the governor and then presidential candidate had segued from prison reform to politics generally, and he became, with Tugwell, Adolf Berle, and a few others, a member of what the press soon called the Brain Trust. Moley measured Roosevelt as a politician and a man, and what he perceived impressed him, in a complex way. “You ask what he is like,” he wrote to his sister, who had inquired about Roosevelt. “That isn’t easy to answer, because I haven’t had the chance to confirm a lot of fleeting impressions.” But those fleeting impressions, confirmed or not, added up to a striking portrait of the man who seemed certain to become America’s next president:

One thing is sure, that the idea people get from his charming manner—that he is soft or flabby in disposition and character—is far from true. When he wants something a lot he can be formidable—when crossed he is hard, stubborn, resourceful, relentless. I used to think on the basis of casual observation that his amiability was ‘lord-of-the-manor,’ ‘good-to-the-peasants’ stuff. It isn’t that at all. He seems quite naturally warm and friendly—less because he genuinely likes many of the people to whom he is pleasant (although he does like a lot of people of all sorts and varieties) than because he just enjoys the pleasant and engaging role, as a charming woman does. And being a born politician, he measures such qualities in himself by the effect they produce on others. He is wholly conscious of his ability to send callers away happy and glowing and in agreement with him and his ideas….

The stories about his illness and its effect upon him are the bunk. Nobody in public life since T.R. has been so robust, so buoyantly and blatantly healthy as this fellow. He is full of animal spirits and keeps himself and the people around him in a rare good humor with a lot of horseplay…. The man’s energy and vitality are astonishing. I’ve been amazed with his interest in things. It skips and bounces through seemingly intricate subjects, and maybe it is my academic training that makes me feel that no one could possibly learn much in such a hit or miss fashion. I don’t find that he has read much about economic subjects. What he gets is from talking to people…. When he stores away the net of conversation, he never knows what part of what he has kept is what he said himself or what his visitor said.

UPON LEARNING that he had carried the Democratic convention, Roosevelt announced that he would do something historically unprecedented: he would address the delegates in person. Tradition dictated that the nominee receive official notification, which typically arrived several weeks after the convention, before delivering his acceptance speech. Roosevelt refused to wait that long—or to wait at all. The decisive vote in Chicago concluded at half past ten on Friday night; by seven thirty Saturday morning he was on an airplane flying west. Air travel wasn’t a novelty in 1932; Charles Lindbergh’s epic crossing of the Atlantic five years earlier had seen to that. But political candidates didn’t travel by air, in part because they wanted to stop and make speeches along the way. Roosevelt, however, chose to fly, in order both to signal a break from the past and to get to the convention before the excitement surrounding his nomination diminished.

Bad weather slowed the flying, and while he made his way across Ohio and Indiana the convention nominated John Nance Garner for vice president. Roosevelt had almost no say in the decision. Garner let it be known that after thirty years in the House he would like to retire to the vice presidency, and the transfer suited all concerned: the Texas delegation, as honoring their favorite son; the Californians, as giving the West a presence in a Roosevelt administration; the Roosevelt camp, as the least that could be done for Garner and his southern and western supporters. There was one other consideration, unspoken except among Garner’s closest friends. Roosevelt seemed hale enough, but so had Warren Harding before he died. Polio couldn’t be beneficial to one’s long-term health; Garner might inherit the presidency before four years were out. Perhaps this possibility inspired the words of Alabama congressman John McDuffie, who praised Garner to the convention as a “sturdy and rugged character” and a “real red-blooded he-man.” The convention approved Garner unanimously on the first vice presidential ballot.

By the time Roosevelt reached the Chicago Stadium, many of the delegates, including nearly all those pledged to Smith, had departed. But their seats were taken by visitors who voiced their enthusiasm for the nominee when his car finally cleared the heavy traffic from the airport. “As Mr. Roosevelt advanced to the rostrum, the great hall seemed to surge upward, an illusion which accompanied the sight of so many thousands rising simultaneously to their feet,” Arthur Krock of the New York Times reported. “It was evident that the thousands of people believed they were in the presence, not only of the nominee of the Democratic party, but of the next President of the United States.”

The thousands in the stadium, and the millions more across the country who listened to Roosevelt’s speech on the radio, heard the nominee embrace the credo of liberalism—proudly, defiantly, confidently. “The Democratic party by tradition and by the continuing logic of history, past and present, is the bearer of liberalism and of progress,” Roosevelt declared. He explained that there were two ways of viewing the role of government in matters touching economics and social life. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped, and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776.” But they had not left. Instead they had regathered as Republicans and had administered the lopsided prosperity of the 1920s. Corporate profits had soared but weren’t shared. Consumers and workers were forgotten. The imbalance was unsustainable, and it had inevitably produced the stock crash and the depression. “You know the story. Surpluses invested in unnecessary plants became idle. Men lost their jobs. Purchasing power dried up. Banks became frightened and started calling loans. Those who had money were afraid to part with it. Credit contracted. Industry stopped. Commerce declined. And unemployment mounted.”

Against the Republicans’ approach of every man for himself, Roosevelt posited a Democratic philosophy of all for one another. This had been the essence of liberalism from the beginning; it became even more so under present circumstances. “Never in history have the interests of all the people been so united in a single economic problem,” Roosevelt said. The depression was threatening city and country, farmers and workers, debtors and creditors, management and labor. “Danger to one is danger to all.” The Republicans, refusing to acknowledge the interconnections, had refused to take ameliorative action; a Democratic administration would rectify the Republicans’ failure. “We are going to make the voters understand this year that this nation is not merely a nation of independence, but it is, if we are to survive, bound to be a nation of interdependence.”

The Republicans pleaded helplessness against what they described as inexorable laws of economics. “But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving…. Economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.” Farmers knew this and rightly expected more of government than they were getting; Roosevelt proposed strong action to reduce crop surpluses. Homeowners knew this as they struggled with their monthly payments; Roosevelt promised measures to lower interest rates and prevent foreclosures. Workers knew this in their search for jobs to replace the ones they had lost; Roosevelt declared that the federal government should enter the labor market and hire workers to develop the nation’s resources.

As he reached the climax of his speech, Roosevelt asserted that the current troubles wouldn’t have been wasted if Americans discovered how to respond.

Throughout the nation, men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the government of the last years look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth. On the farms, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in the villages, millions of our citizens cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever. Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain.

I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, a candidate in 1932 could have waged a national campaign without leaving home. Radio increasingly knitted the nation into a single communications sphere, enabling the candidate to reach almost any interested citizen via the airwaves. But political practice lagged behind technical advance. The national radio networks—two NBC networks, the Blue (which would become ABC) and the Red (NBC); and CBS—covered politics as news and introduced candidates to the voters, but they did so on the networks’ terms rather than candidates’ or the parties’. The networks also carried advertising: of automobiles, appliances, apparel, real estate, cigarettes, and myriad other goods and services. Yet the general use of radio to advertise candidates—to present the candidates to voters on the candidates’ terms—remained in the future. A candidate who wanted to get his message out to voters still needed to get himself out to voters, which meant touring the country.

Whistle-stopping had a mixed history. William Jennings Bryan’s western tour in 1896 had failed against William McKinley’s front-porch campaign. James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt had toured in 1920 and lost to the stay-at-home Harding. Silent Cal Coolidge had kept silent and still in Washington while John W. Davis barnstormed and got buried in 1924.

Roosevelt’s advisers urged him to avoid a continental campaign. The momentum of events was clearly in his favor; he simply needed to avoid mistakes to capture the White House. And mistakes were easier to avoid in Albany or Hyde Park than in distant locales where the Republicans could lay traps and spring tricks. On the road he would be pestered to speak in detail about his plans and policies, and details, at this stage, would only get him into trouble. Besides, he was governor of New York; he might best demonstrate his fitness for national executive office by tending to the state executive office he currently held. To neglect his current office in the quest for a future office might strike voters as irresponsible.

There was another aspect to the caution, rarely voiced. Roosevelt looked healthy and strong, but he was a polio survivor and a paraplegic. Cross-country travel was strenuous, cross-country political travel even more so. What if Roosevelt became fatigued and stumbled, literally or figuratively? There was the related question of political perceptions. Roosevelt never directly denied his disability, and anyone who followed politics knew about his struggle with polio and its aftereffects. But neither did he trumpet his disability, and he would be asking for the votes of people who had not followed politics. At home he could control camera angles and access by reporters; on the road he would be at the mercy of chance and local planners. At a time of national distress, Americans were looking for strength in their leader. Would they accept that a half-paralyzed person could provide such strength?

Roosevelt ignored the advice and flicked away the worries like so much cigarette ash. “I have a streak of Dutch stubbornness in me,” he told Jim Farley. “And the Dutch is up this time. I’m going campaigning to the Pacific Coast and discuss every important issue of the campaign.”

Dutch stubbornness was part of the story. Another part was the desire of the recovering polio victim to test himself. Could he stand the strain of an extended tour? If he couldn’t, better to know now than later, for as difficult as a campaign might be, its stresses would be nothing next to those of the presidency itself. The former assistant navy secretary was familiar with shakedown cruises as they applied to ships; a Pacific Coast tour would serve the same purpose for himself.

And there was something else again. Roosevelt was already thinking past the election to how he would govern. Hoover’s continuing failure was a tribute to caution; Roosevelt intended to be the boldest president since Lincoln. A western swing would showcase his boldness and carry his fight against caution and timidity across the continent. For decades the West had been a wild card in American politics, electing everyone from Populists to Progressives to Democrats to Republicans. The West would test Roosevelt’s ideas even as it tested his constitution.

He set out in early September. At Topeka he aired his thinking on the farm problem to an audience that included Bryanites, Wilsonians, Hooverists, and the odd Debsian. He reiterated his perception of the seamlessness of American economic life. “Industrial prosperity can reach only artificial and temporary heights, as it did in 1929, if at the same time there is no agricultural prosperity,” he said. “This nation cannot endure if it is half boom and half broke.” Any effective answer to the farm question must tackle the problem of overproduction, and the federal government should take the lead. “I favor a definite policy looking to the planned use of the land,” Roosevelt said. Some acreage would have to be withdrawn from production—voluntarily, to the extent possible. Coercion would be counterproductive. Yet careful planning and cooperative education would yield a policy all could live with and benefit from. The purpose was simple and beyond dispute—“the restoration of agriculture to economic equality with other industries within the United States.”

At Salt Lake City, Roosevelt turned from agriculture to industry. Railroads weren’t the quintessential mode of transport they had been in Roosevelt’s youth; cars, trucks, and buses had eroded the trains’ oligopoly of land travel. But the railroad industry remained one of America’s largest, and together the rail companies still carried the great bulk of what Americans wanted moved from one place to another. The railroads, however, were in a sad state. Overbuilt during the nineteenth century and never sufficiently thinned, they suffered from their own version of the oversupply that afflicted farmers. Capitalist theory would have let them slug it out, with the weaker ones failing. But the collateral damage would have been as dire as from a similar remedy in agriculture. The railroads employed nearly two million workers; some thirty million Americans owned railroad stock either directly or through savings banks and insurance companies; the entire American population depended on speedy and reliable rail service. The cause of the rail troubles, like the cause of the farm problems, Roosevelt said, was “the entire absence of national planning.” The answer, as in farming, was precisely such planning. “The individual railroads should be regarded as parts of a national transportation system.”

At Seattle, Roosevelt spoke on the tariff. The workers in Seattle, the great seaport of the Northwest, were among the most militant in the country; many had participated in the general strike of 1919, which began on the docks and in the shipyards before paralyzing the city as a whole. The depression had the Puget Sound district again on edge—an edge Roosevelt sharpened by blaming the Republicans’ Smoot-Hawley tariff for disrupting the trade on which Seattle and its hinterland depended. He had to be careful in proposing remedies, for any reduction in American tariffs threatened further damage to American jobs. And so he proposed reciprocal reductions of tariffs, negotiated country by country. “This principle of tariff by negotiation means to deal with each country concerned, on the basis of fair barter,” he explained. “If it has something we need, and we have something it needs, a tariff agreement can and should be made.” Such an approach would restore trade without jeopardizing American livelihoods. In the process it would ease the international tensions the tariff war had produced.

At Portland, where the mighty Columbia River slowed on its long rush from the Rocky Mountains to the sea, Roosevelt spoke of hydroelectric power. Again he urged a national perspective. “The question of power, of electrical development and distribution, is primarily a national problem,” he said. “When the great possessions that belong to all of us—that belong to the nation—are at stake, we are not partisans; we are Americans.” Electricity promised great benefits to Americans of all regions and occupations. “It lights our homes, our places of work, and our streets. It turns the wheels of most of our transportation and our factories…. It can relieve the drudgery of the housewife and lift the great burden off the shoulders of the hardworking farmer.” It could do so, at any rate, if the government ensured that it not become a captive of private interests. Roosevelt didn’t propose to dismantle existing private power companies, but he advocated a larger role for government as a regulator of private companies and in some cases their competitor. On a larger scale, the federal government must direct the development of regional watersheds. Critics would cry radicalism, Roosevelt acknowledged. For them he had an answer: “My policy is as radical as American liberty. My policy is as radical as the Constitution.”

BY THE END of September, with the election still six weeks away, Roosevelt had given voters a fairly comprehensive view of his philosophy of government. He believed that the depression signified a breakdown of the American capitalist system; the system’s unfettered competition had run the economy into a deep rut from which the American people could not escape without the intervention of government. Government planners, in a Roosevelt administration, would temper and guide the competition, adding Washington’s visible hand to the invisible hand of the marketplace. Roosevelt remained stingy with details of government’s guidance, but anyone at all interested in politics realized that a vote for Roosevelt would be a vote for greater government participation in the American political economy.

On one issue Roosevelt was less than candid. As a veteran of Washington and the present chief executive of New York state, he couldn’t help but realize that the programs he envisioned would be expensive. Yet he spoke as though he could have his New Deal—the phrase was just beginning to be capitalized—and trim government too. Roosevelt railed at the Republicans for profligacy in government. “We are paying for the cost of our three kinds of government”—federal, state, and local—“$125 a year for every man, woman, and child in the United States, or $625 for the average family of five people,” he said. This level of spending was outrageous and couldn’t be sustained. Roosevelt condemned the Hoover administration for fiscal mismanagement, and for covering its mismanagement with a string of prevarication. “It started off by saying that it was going to balance the budget,” Roosevelt declared. “Fine! Then it said it was balancing the budget. Fine! And finally it said it had balanced the budget. Better yet!” But it hadn’t balanced the budget, as the Treasury Department’s own report for the most recent quarter made plain. “‘Excess of expenditures over receipts,’” Roosevelt quoted indignantly: “‘$402,043,002.’ There you are!”

A Roosevelt administration would do much better. It would speak forthrightly, and it would manage the government effectively. “Before any man enters my cabinet,” Roosevelt said, “he must give me a two-fold pledge: 1. Absolute loyalty to the Democratic platform, and especially its economy plank”—which promised a balanced budget—“2. Complete cooperation with me looking to economy and reorganization in his department.” Lest the message somehow be lost, he reiterated: “I regard reduction in federal spending as one of the most important issues of this campaign. In my opinion, it is the most direct and effective contribution that government can make to business.”

HERBERT HOOVER was a proud man who despised Franklin Roosevelt for some of the same reasons Al Smith did. Like Smith, Hoover had earned, through hard work and applied intelligence, everything he attained in life. He couldn’t see that Roosevelt had earned anything, and with the smugness of the self-made man he assumed Roosevelt was lacking in character and ability. He didn’t deny that Roosevelt possessed a certain charisma, but he considered charisma badly overrated—especially when it caused those who came into contact with Roosevelt to fall for the arguments he was making against Hoover’s administration.

Hoover initially attempted to ignore Roosevelt’s assaults, on the ground that a president had more important things to worry about. Hoover didn’t lack for worries during the summer and autumn of 1932. The depression persisted, although Hoover detected signs of economic improvement that were lost on most disinterested observers. Veterans of the World War were demanding early payment of a bonus Congress had promised for their old age. Many of them were unemployed, and they gathered in Washington to register their opinion with the legislature and the administration. In time the “Bonus Army” swelled to twenty thousand, along with many wives and children. Washington, like other cities during the depression, included a large population of homeless people; the arrival of so many more unattached souls made the local authorities nervous. That the vets were skilled with weapons and that some had become radicalized by the collapse of the economy contributed to the concern their presence evoked.

Hoover opposed prepayment of the bonus, contending that the government couldn’t afford it, that veterans shouldn’t be given special treatment, and that capitulation to pressure would encourage other groups to try similar stunts. The Republican Senate joined him in opposition after the Democratic House voted in favor. The House and the Senate did agree, with Hoover’s concurrence, that the federal government should assist in the demobilization of the Bonus Army, by offering to pay to transport the protesters home.

Most accepted the government’s offer and departed. But a few thousand, many with no homes to return to, remained where they were on the east bank of the Anacostia River. A separate contingent occupied some government buildings not far from the White House, from which they sallied forth to picket the White House. Hoover, who had displayed coolness and courage directing relief in Europe during the World War, unaccountably took fright at this dismal display by a comparative handful of hoboes. He barricaded himself in the executive mansion and ordered the capital police to clear the squatters from federal property. When the vets resisted, the affair turned violent. Two of the protesters were killed and several policemen were injured. Hoover ordered federal troops to augment the police force.

Command of the military operation fell to General Douglas MacArthur, a decorated World War veteran who had advanced to chief of staff of the army. His aide was Dwight Eisenhower, a colonel with talent but little opportunity to show it. Eisenhower questioned the necessity of deploying federal soldiers against the protesters, and he advised MacArthur against getting personally involved. “He had no business going down there,” Eisenhower recalled later. “I told him it was no place for the chief of staff.” But MacArthur was eager to act against what he judged an incipient insurgency. “That mob down there was a bad-looking mob,” he told reporters after a reconnaissance of the veterans’ camp. “It was animated by the essence of revolution.”

Hoover gave his approval. “A considerable part of those remaining are not veterans,” the president asserted. “Many are communists and persons with criminal records.” The right to petition was a cornerstone of American politics, but other values, notably order and tranquility, were equally essential. “The first obligation of my office is to uphold and defend the Constitution and the authority of the law. This I propose always to do.”

MacArthur’s units swept through the veterans’ camp with bayonets, machine guns, and tanks. The general apparently exceeded Hoover’s orders, advancing farther than the president desired and utilizing more force than Hoover wished. But Hoover failed to call him back, and within a short time the Anacostia camp was an empty, smoldering ruin.

The victory, such as it was, came at the cost of scores of casualties, including the death of a small baby, which outraged millions of Americans already disposed to think of Hoover as distant and hard-hearted. Franklin Roosevelt, observing from Albany, shared the outrage even as he understood that he would benefit from it. “Well, Felix,” he told Felix Frankfurter, an adjunct member of the Brain Trust, “this will elect me.”

THE EPISODE enlightened Roosevelt about Douglas MacArthur. As the real army was routing the Bonus Army, Roosevelt was having lunch with Rex Tugwell. They were discussing farm policy and political matters when a call came from Huey Long in Louisiana. Roosevelt took the call at the table, allowing Tugwell to hear his end of the conversation. Long’s loud voice enabled Tugwell to hear the other end as well.

“God damn it, Frank!” Long began. “Who d’you think got you nominated?” Long had supported Roosevelt at the Democratic convention.

“Well, you had a lot to do with it, Huey,” Roosevelt answered, declining to add the obvious: that others had had much more to do with it than Long had.

“You sure as hell are forgettin’ about it as fast as you can. Here I sit down here and never hear from anybody, and what do I see in the papers? That stuffed shirt Owen Young comes to see you.” Young was the chairman of General Electric and a presumed enemy of the populist policies Long favored.

“Oh, I see a lot of people you don’t read about,” Roosevelt said. “The newspaper boys only write up the ones their editors like.”

“We won’t even carry these states down here if you don’t stop listening to those people,” Long shouted into the phone. “You got to turn me loose.”

“What do you mean, turn you loose? You don’t need anyone to do that. You are loose.”

“I can’t win elections without money…. I’ll carry this country for you, but I can’t do it without money.”

“You never needed money before. Why do you need it now?”

“Damn it! You musta been born yesterday. I know where to get money when I’m runnin’ for myself. But this ain’t the same. I’m runnin’ for you; don’t you know that?…You mind what I tell you. Stop wastin’ time seein’ those Owen Youngs. Let me come up there. People are goin’ to feel a lot better if they see me comin’ out of that big house than those crooks that got us into this mess in the first place.”

“I’ll see you get asked, Huey. You keep your shirt on. It will be all right.”

“You ask me up there, Frank. I’ll give you some schemes that’ll bring in the votes.”

The telephone call terminated when Roosevelt hung up, with Long still bellowing down the wire. Roosevelt shook his head in a combination of astonishment and recognition. “You know,” he told Tugwell, “that’s the second most dangerous man in this country.” Before Tugwell could respond, Roosevelt elaborated: “Huey’s a whiz on the radio. He screams at people and they love it. He makes them think they belong to some kind of church. He knows there’s a promised land, and he’ll lead them to it. Everyone will be rich; there will be no more work. And all they have to do is vote the way he says. He’ll throw all the wicked Wall Streeters into a pit somewhere and cover it up. Then he and his folks can build their paradise. It’s a time for that kind of thing. It’s spreading.” Roosevelt recognized that he’d have to deal with Long at some point. But he would do so very carefully. “When anyone eats with Huey, it had better be with a good long spoon.”

Roosevelt had never spoken so unguardedly to Tugwell, who found this discursion fascinating. Tugwell almost forgot a mental note he had made amid the telephone conversation, but he remembered it as the luncheon ended. “You said Huey was the second most dangerous person, didn’t you?” he asked Roosevelt. “Did I hear it the way you said it?”

Roosevelt had been waiting for the question. He smiled. “You heard it all right,” he answered. “I meant it. Huey is only second. The first is Doug MacArthur. You saw how he strutted down Pennsylvania Avenue. You saw that picture of him in the Times after the troops chased all those vets out with tear gas and burned their shelters. Did you ever see anyone more self-satisfied? There’s a potential Mussolini for you. Right here at home. The head man in the army. That’s a perfect position if things get disorderly enough and good citizens work up enough anxiety.” Roosevelt explained that he knew MacArthur from the World War. “You’ve never heard him talk, but I have. He has the most portentous style of anyone I know. He talks in a voice that might come from an oracle’s cave. He never doubts and never argues or suggests; he makes pronouncements. What he thinks is final. Besides, he’s intelligent, a brilliant soldier like his father before him. He got to be a brigadier in France.” Now he saw his opportunity in America. “If all this talk comes to anything—about government going to pieces and not being able to stop the spreading disorder—Doug MacArthur is the man. In his way, he’s as much a demagogue as Huey. He has as much ego, too. He thinks he’s infallible—if he’s always right, all people need to do is to take orders. And if some don’t like it, he’ll take care of them in his own way.”

THE BONUS ARMY debacle struck Hoover as another example of the bad luck that had dogged him since taking office. First the stock crash, then the collapse of the economy, and now this. The president felt misused by fate and misunderstood by the American people, who made bitter jokes at his expense. Shantytowns were “Hoovervilles,” pockets turned inside out were “Hoover flags.” At least one hitchhiker got himself across the country on the strength of a scrawled placard warning “Give me a lift or I’ll vote for Hoover.”

It didn’t help matters that Hoover wasn’t a regular politician. He had never run for office before 1928. He had been anointed to succeed Coolidge and been elected without effort. He had never been subjected to the kind of roughing up that typically comes with democratic politics. When, in 1932, Roosevelt landed some stinging blows, he took personal offense.

Hoover couldn’t believe that anyone might honestly and knowledgeably differ with him regarding economic theory. His global career in mining, his experience in Europe during the war, and his trade-promoting initiatives as commerce secretary had attuned him to the international aspects of modern economics, and he was mentally and morally convinced that America’s depression was principally the result of disturbances abroad. He knew that he had done nothing to bring it on, and he deeply resented anything indicating he had. He equally resented suggestions that his policies ignored the ordinary people of America. His roots were as ordinary as anyone’s, and he never forgot them. Or so he told anyone willing to listen.

He hadn’t intended to campaign hard, believing a few speeches urging the electorate to steer a steady course would suffice. But Roosevelt’s relentless attacks aroused his combative instincts. And when Republican Maine, which voted in September for Congress and statewide offices (to avoid the cold of November), returned Democrats, the president’s complacent illusions evaporated. “It is a catastrophe for us,” he said of the Maine result. “The thing for us to do is to carry the fight right to Roosevelt…. We have got to crack him every time he opens his mouth.”

In a series of speeches he would have considered beneath him just months before, Hoover blasted Roosevelt for attempting to provoke class warfare and for frightening investors who, the president claimed, were poised to return to the markets and revive the economy. Hoover couldn’t decide whether Roosevelt was naïve or cynical in blaming American speculators and the Republican administration for the depression—whether Roosevelt simply didn’t understand that the depression was an international phenomenon or, understanding, nonetheless chose to make it appear the fault of rich Republicans. The roots of the crisis, the president contended, ran backward to the World War and outward across the Atlantic and Pacific to Europe and Asia. The international debt and reparations tangle had greatly magnified otherwise manageable domestic troubles. Anyone who argued otherwise was a liar or a fool. Hoover charged Roosevelt and the Democrats with constructing a “labyrinth of inaccurate statements,” of being “false prophets of a millennium promised through seductive but unworkable and disastrous theories of government.” The solution to the depression was not government intervention in the economy but patient adherence to the principles that had constructed the economy in the first place. When October’s statistics revealed that nearly a million men had gone back to work in the most recent quarter, Hoover claimed confirmation of the soundness of the administration’s policies. “To enter upon a series of deep changes now, to embark upon this inchoate ‘new deal’ which has been propounded in this campaign would not only undermine and destroy our American system, but it will delay for months and years the possibility of recovery.”

Beyond the current quarter, and beyond the present campaign, Americans faced a choice between two visions for their country. “This campaign is more than a contest between two men,” Hoover asserted. “It is a contest between two philosophies of government.” Hoover characterized his own conservative philosophy as that which had built the nation; it put its faith in the individual and the private sector. He described Roosevelt’s philosophy as one that looked to government. In this it was novel and threatening. “You cannot extend the mastery of government over the daily life of a people without somewhere making it master of people’s souls and thoughts,” Hoover said. Roosevelt talked of the government controlling the economy, as though the government would stop there. It would not. “Economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved.”

JIM FARLEY ASSERTED, safely after the fact, that he had been confident of the outcome of the 1932 election well in advance. “As the campaign moved down the homestretch…,” he said, “it was as certain as anything humanly could be that the American electorate was getting ready for one of those periods of drastic upheaval which result in the ‘ins’ being tossed out rather unceremoniously while the ‘outs’ take over the government.” The evidence took various forms. “President Hoover was out on the stump frantically endeavoring to regain the magic of his lost prestige. Larger and larger crowds flocked to the Roosevelt rallies to get a glimpse of him, one of the best signs that popular sympathy was running in his direction.” Another signal was even more telling. “The ‘fence-sitters’ and the gentlemen who love to bet on the winner were flocking into headquarters to congratulate me and others on the manner in which the campaign was conducted. There are always large numbers of those folks, whom I once heard described as invincible in victory and invisible in defeat.”

Roosevelt could read the signs as well as Farley, and while he shared Farley’s confidence he determined to keep the pressure on. He intended not to coast to election but to win in a rout. He was convinced that the country needed a change of direction. He had been convinced of this for a decade—convinced that the capitalist-tilting, status quo policies of the Republicans were unfair to the ordinary people of America and counterproductive to America’s abiding national interests. But only now did the country appear to agree. Roosevelt insisted that the agreement be rendered as loudly and clearly as possible.

He wrapped up his campaign where Democrat candidates had finished for decades: at Madison Square Garden, on the Saturday before the election. “Our case has been stated and made,” he told the eager throng of party faithful. “In every home, to every individual, in every part of our wide land, full opportunity has been given to hear that case, and to render honest judgment on Tuesday.” Roosevelt didn’t quite declare victory, but he came close.

From the time that my airplane touched ground at Chicago up to the present, I have consistently set forth the doctrine of the present-day Democracy. It is the program of a party dedicated to the conviction that every one of our people is entitled to the opportunity to earn a living, and to develop himself to the fullest measure consistent with the rights of his fellow men. You are familiar with that program. You are aware that it has found favor in the sight of the American electorate…. Tonight we set the seal upon that program. After Tuesday, we go forward to the great task of its accomplishment.

DEMOCRACY DOESN’T delve into voters’ minds; it merely counts their votes. Certainly many of those who voted for Roosevelt on November 8, 1932, were drawn to the polls by his vision of an America united by equality of opportunity. Just as certainly, many were driven to the polls by their dissatisfaction with Hoover’s management of America’s political economy. But there was no way of telling where the balance lay between the two groups—between those who voted for Roosevelt’s New Deal and those who voted against Hoover’s old one.

The distinction would be crucial, but it wasn’t on that day. Roosevelt cast his own ballot at Hyde Park, as he always did, and he traveled to New York to await the returns. Four years earlier, from the same Biltmore Hotel, he had felt obliged to threaten to send the sheriffs to ensure a fair tally in the race that narrowly made him governor; this time a whole army couldn’t have halted the landslide that made him president. He beat Hoover by 7 million popular votes (23 million to 16 million), and 413 electoral votes (472 to 59). He carried forty-two of forty-eight states, losing only Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine (which came back to the Republicans in the presidential contest, after its earlier defection to the Democrats).

The landslide extended to the congressional races. The Democrats added 97 seats to their existing majority in the House, giving them a margin of 310 to 117. They captured the Senate almost as decisively, by 60 to 35. Overnight the Republicans were transformed from the dominant party in the country to a footnote. Roosevelt and the Democrats, if they could maintain even a semblance of unity, could essentially ignore the party of Lincoln, McKinley, and the first Roosevelt.

This final formulation—the first Roosevelt—lingered in Franklin Roosevelt’s mind as he prepared to become the second President Roosevelt. “Give my regards to all the family,” he told Theodore’s son Kermit, who dropped by the Biltmore to offer congratulations. Kermit said he would. “But I don’t know how welcome this news is going to be.”

21.

“I WISH I KNEW WHAT YOU ARE REALLY THINKING AND FEELING,” Franklin said to Eleanor on election night. She had congratulated him on his victory, but with less enthusiasm than might have been expected in the next First Lady of the United States.

She declined to enlighten him. “From the personal standpoint, I did not want my husband to be president,” she explained afterward. “I realized, however, that it was impossible to keep a man out of public service when that was what he wanted and was undoubtedly well equipped for. It was pure selfishness on my part, and I never mentioned my feelings on the subject to him.” She didn’t have to. She and Franklin had been together for three decades, and he could sense her misgivings even if he didn’t know their precise nature. She was later more forthcoming, although not to him. “As I saw it, this meant the end of any personal life of my own,” she said. “I knew what traditionally should lie before me. I had watched Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and had seen what it meant to be the wife of the president, and I cannot say that I was pleased at the prospect…. The turmoil in my heart and mind was rather great that night.”

Franklin’s election sealed the bargain Eleanor had made with him fourteen years earlier. They had decided against divorce in part to preserve his political career. Now that he had grasped the holy grail of American politics, he could ask no more of her. Had she stepped back, perhaps playing the White House hostess but otherwise leaving politics to him, he could have had no complaint. Most other First Ladies had been retiring; she could have followed their lead.

But she didn’t. Instead she became even more active in politics than she had ever been. In the process she revealed the hidden part of her bargain with Franklin—hidden from him for years, and perhaps from herself for some substantial period. In standing by him in public, even as she refused to lie beside him in private, she preserved not only his political career but her own. Politics came naturally to the niece of Theodore Roosevelt, although she didn’t awaken to its possibilities until after she had married Franklin and borne him six children. Probably not coincidentally, her political awakening occurred shortly after her bargain with Franklin, in the 1920 campaign in which Louis Howe mentored her. She discovered she liked the thrill of the contest. Her encouragement to Franklin to return from polio to politics was for his benefit but also for hers. Politics added meaning to her life—the meaning of participation in important endeavors and of working toward worthy ends.

Franklin’s election as governor had broadened Eleanor politically. A lifelong liberal of the noblesse oblige school, she embarked as New York’s First Lady on the same kinds of improving initiatives that had first attracted her to progressivism on Rivington Street. Franklin insisted on visiting various state institutions, to determine whether they were providing value for taxpayer money, but he often discovered on arrival that he couldn’t get past the front door, as the buildings that housed the agencies weren’t designed for paraplegics. So he would send Eleanor inside. At first he provided lists of items to observe and questions to ask—how many beds there were in each asylum room, whether prison inmates received the food the legislature had appropriated monies for. Soon Eleanor was poking around on her own. “Before the end of our years in Albany,” she said without the modesty that sometimes shrouded her accomplishments, “I had become a fairly expert reporter on state institutions.”

Roosevelt’s election as president expanded her vistas still further. The federal bureaucracy was denser and more elaborate than New York state’s; she would have to sharpen her reporting skills to uncover its secrets. But Franklin would need her more than ever, if only because the country was so much bigger than the state and because the demands on a president made a governor appear a part-timer. Eleanor would lose some of the personal independence she had come to cherish, but her compensation would be political influence of a degree wielded by very few.

JAMES ROOSEVELT remembered something else about the moment of Franklin’s victory. “When we finally got home that night”—to the house on East Sixty-fifth Street—“I helped him into bed, the same bed in which I had seen him, an almost helpless invalid, that first Christmas after his polio attack. He was still Pa, only now he was not just Pa; he was the President-elect of the United States.” Yet they talked as father and son, in a way they hadn’t talked in years. They spoke for a long time, neither wanting the moment to end. Finally James kissed his father good night.

“You know, Jimmy,” Franklin said, “all my life I have been afraid of only one thing—fire. Tonight I think I’m afraid of something else.”

“Afraid of what, Pa?”

“I’m just afraid that I may not have the strength to do this job.” He paused reflectively. “After you leave me tonight, Jimmy, I am going to pray. I am going to pray that God will help me, that he will give me the strength and the guidance to do this job and to do it right. I hope you will pray for me, too, Jimmy.”

Roosevelt rarely talked about religion, his own or others’. Yet Eleanor thought Franklin’s religion explained much about his personality and leadership style. His religion was the basis, she said, of his striking self-confidence. It was a “very simple religion,” Eleanor observed. “He believed in God and in His guidance. He felt that human beings were given tasks to perform and with those tasks the ability and strength to put them through. He could pray for help and guidance and have faith in his own judgment as a result.”

Beyond this basic theology Roosevelt chose not to venture. His reluctance reflected his general aversion to introspection. To think deeply about faith required thinking deeply about the inner life, which Roosevelt hesitated to do. But he kept his distance from religion for other reasons as well. To worship in public demanded that he negotiate the steps and curbs that blocked his access to most public places. He was willing to make the effort on special occasions. But regular attendance at church was more trouble than it was worth, potentially embarrassing to him and definitely distracting to the other congregants.

No less important in guiding him away from religion was the touchiness of the Democrats on the subject. The party included Southern Baptists, Irish Catholics, and East European Jews, in addition to the more mainstream Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists. Roosevelt had struggled for a decade to draw the different wings of the party together. His election showed he was succeeding. He had no desire to jeopardize his success by raising issues best left to the theologians.

HERBERT HOOVER hated Roosevelt during the campaign, and he hated him even more after the election. The lame duck president refused to believe that the landslide for Roosevelt conferred legitimacy on Roosevelt’s approach to governance; it simply demonstrated that the American people could be deluded by false promises of an easy return to prosperity. The uptick of the economy before the election allowed Hoover to assert—at the time and afterward—that his patient policies had all but ended the depression, only for the economy to swoon again as a result of Roosevelt’s victory, which frightened investors and made them withdraw from the markets once more. Like many other counterfactual claims, Hoover’s couldn’t be disproved. Decades later the former president would acknowledge certain limitations on his perspective of policy. “My education was that of an engineer,” he told an interviewer. “I do not know all the nuances of economics.” But in the autumn of 1932 he was convinced that he knew more economics than Roosevelt, and he was determined that his views should guide American policy.

Of most pressing importance during the weeks after the election was a pending loan payment from Britain. The interconnected system of European reparations and loans had continued to creak during the late 1920s, and it was rescued from utter collapse after the onset of the depression only by a twelve-month moratorium on payments among all the major financial powers, including the United States. An Anglo-French-German conference at Lausanne, Switzerland, during the summer of 1932 proposed to extend the suspension of payments but required acceptance by the United States to take effect. Hoover advocated acceptance yet recognized, upon losing the election, that Roosevelt needed to be consulted and, ideally, brought aboard. “I am loath to proceed with recommendations to the Congress until I can have an opportunity to confer with you personally,” Hoover wired Roosevelt.

“The President’s telegram took us completely by surprise,” Ray Moley recalled, referring to the Roosevelt camp. “We could not remember any other case in which an outgoing President, during the interregnum, had asked for the advice and assistance of his successful opponent.” The surprise evoked caution, and when Hoover followed up with a telephone call, Roosevelt was wary. Hoover proposed a face-to-face meeting at the White House. “I have a number of things I would like to discuss with you,” he said. “And I wonder if you could bring someone with you, because there are a lot of things that ought to be looked into which cannot be decided on the minute.”

“Yes, I can bring a secretary,” Roosevelt replied. “I hadn’t thought of anybody.”

“I would like to bring in Ogden Mills, because I would like to give you an outline of what is going on abroad,” Hoover said, referring to his Treasury secretary. “I would like to have somebody on your side to start studying these questions…. I have a feeling that we have to put up national solidarity.”

“That’s right,” Roosevelt said. For the first time with Hoover, Roosevelt employed his habitual device of suggesting agreement when all he actually intended was to draw his interlocutor out.

Hoover apparently took Roosevelt’s verbal nod as assent to the president’s call for a united front. He explained that the situation was critical. The Europeans were demanding an answer from the American government to their financial proposal. “Immediate action” was required, Hoover said.

“Yes, that’s right,” Roosevelt reiterated.

“There are other things that need ironing out with respect to their commitments, but the one definite thing is a note of reply that we should send to them.”

“That’s right.”

The two men arranged to meet a few days hence. Roosevelt would be traveling to Warm Springs for a postelection breather and would stop in Washington. He brought Moley along as his adviser. “When we arrived in Washington on November 22, we found the studied courtesy of the official reception a wry antidote for the warmth of the crowds in the streets,” Moley remembered. The last time Roosevelt and Hoover had met was also at the White House, when Hoover the previous April had hosted a reception for a national conference of governors. By design or accident, Hoover had kept the governors and their wives waiting—standing—in the East Room for more than half an hour. Most of the guests managed well enough, but Roosevelt, balanced on his braces, found the wait an ordeal. He said nothing, but Moley and other Roosevelt aides detected a sharper edge in his attacks on the president in campaign speeches in the months that followed.

On this occasion Roosevelt and Moley rode the elevator to the second floor. Hoover was waiting in the Red Room—“grave, dignified, and somewhat uneasy,” Moley observed. The president and the president-elect exchanged empty pleasantries before the former turned to the business at hand. “Hoover plunged into a long recital on the debt question,” Moley wrote. “He spoke without interruption for nearly an hour. Shyness, at the beginning, seemed to make him fix his eyes on the beautiful seal of the United States woven into the red carpet. After a while he began looking at me as he talked—a circumstance about which I had no more reason to be pleased than the inanimate carpet.” Hoover glanced at Roosevelt only intermittently and briefly; Moley read this as evidence of persisting anger at the man who had defeated him. But whatever the delivery of the monologue, its content was impressive. “Before he had finished, it was clear that we were in the presence of the best-informed individual in the country on the question of the debts. His story showed a mastery of detail and a clarity of arrangement that compelled admiration.”

But not cooperation, which was what Hoover wanted. The president explained that though the debt and reparation issues were separate—at least from the standpoint of the United States, which had loaned the money to the British and French but had no responsibility for the Versailles reparations settlement—any attempts to resolve the difficulties the two issues raised ought to take place simultaneously. To this end Hoover recommended reconvening the international debt commission that had rescheduled the payments during the 1920s. Hoover’s purpose in throwing the conundrum to the debt commission was twofold: to underscore the international aspect of the depression and to mitigate opposition in America to any further rescheduling. Influential members of Congress were already on record as opposing rescheduling, but Hoover thought that by appointing several senators and representatives to the commission he might bring the legislature around. Roosevelt’s support would assist his strategy immensely.

Roosevelt wasn’t prepared to endorse the president’s plan. He agreed that the Europeans ought to be allowed to make their case for rescheduling. “I see no reason why the old legal maxim that a debtor ought to have access to the creditor shouldn’t prevail,” he said. But then he turned to Moley, who after concurring that the principle of access was sound—“Even a horse trader does that”—predicted that reconvening the debt commission would raise expectations that almost certainly couldn’t be met. Better to hold the British and French to the debt payments coming due in December and invite them to make their case for full or partial forgiveness through the regular channels of the State Department.

Roosevelt nodded as Moley spoke—much as he had nodded when Hoover had spoken. But again he was being agreeable rather than agreeing. He hadn’t thought the debt question through, and he didn’t want to commit himself. Besides, he had serious reservations about going to the debt commission. He recognized that any settlement the commission would recommend would involve forgiveness of at least some of the debt owed the American government. This would be terribly unpopular with Congress. Moreover, turning to an international commission would tend to confirm Hoover’s internationalist explanation of the causes of the depression. This was less important now that the election was over, but it still would limit Roosevelt’s ability to attack the depression as he saw fit. The New Deal remained in the conceptual stage, with many aspects unformed, but it would certainly entail a fundamental shifting of the balance of power among workers, farmers, and corporations within the American economy. To justify this change, Roosevelt needed to contend that the depression had domestic roots. Finally, Roosevelt was reluctant to tie himself to anything connected to Hoover. If he agreed even to the principle of a debt commission, he would make himself hostage to the recommendations of the commission, which until March 4, 1933, would reflect Hoover’s views far more than his own. This was unacceptable.

IT WAS UNACCEPTABLE not simply for limiting his freedom of action as he entered the White House but for tying his hands over the longer term. Roosevelt intended much more than reforming the economy; he proposed to reconfigure the American political system. He had been a practicing Democrat for more than two decades, quite long enough to realize how dysfunctional his party was, with its shotgun multiple marriage of country and city, of southern white supremacists and northern ethnics, of Bible-thumping conservatives and agnostic liberals. Roosevelt was a Democrat by birth and convenience but a progressive by conviction and anticipation. He was, moreover, a Roosevelt, whose family name summoned memories of impatience with party and willingness to break old molds in the service of new ideals.

Roosevelt envisioned a realignment of the parties, with himself leading the progressives of both existing parties into a new party not unlike that which Uncle Ted had headed in 1912. “I’ll be in the White House for eight years,” he told Rex Tugwell during the campaign. “When those years are over, there’ll be a Progressive party. It may not be Democratic, but it will be Progressive.” This prospect was one reason he had refused to sit on his lead during the campaign, why he continued to press forward long after victory was certain. He wanted to win a personal victory that clearly eclipsed the victory of the Democrats, so that he—rather than the Democrats in Congress—could set the agenda for his presidency. He had yet to reveal just how progressive his policies would be, in part because he hadn’t yet decided. But he was certainly more progressive than the southern mules who would try to dominate the Senate, and more progressive than big-business apologists of the party’s neo-Cleveland wing.

He was far too canny to tip his hand to any but the most trusted insiders. He certainly didn’t inform Hoover, who left their White House meeting thinking Roosevelt had agreed to the calling of the debt commission. Such, at any rate, was what Hoover told Henry Stimson afterward. The secretary of state had expected little from the Hoover-Roosevelt session. “My chief fear is the attitude in which Hoover is approaching the meeting,” Stimson recorded in his diary. “He has allowed himself to get so full of distrust of his rival that I think it will go far to prevent a profitable meeting.” Hoover’s initial reaction after the meeting suggested that Stimson had been too pessimistic. “He told me that they had spent most of their time in educating a very ignorant, and as he expressed it, a well-meaning young man. But they thought they had made some progress. He told me that Roosevelt had promised to come out in favor of the President’s and Mills’ plan.”

In this belief Hoover issued a statement urging Congress to establish the debt commission. Roosevelt responded the next day with a statement of his own, rejecting the commission approach. “My view is that the most convenient and effective contacts can be made through the existing agencies and constituted channels of diplomatic intercourse,” Roosevelt said. Nor should the president even consider forgiving any of the debt. “Existing debt agreements are unalterable save by Congressional action.”

Hoover was furious—“very much excited,” in Stimson’s words. The president determined to bulldoze ahead regardless of Roosevelt. Citing the “grave world economic situation,” the president announced that he would, on his own authority, appoint a commission to examine the debt question, along with related issues—related in Hoover’s mind, at any rate—of currency fluctuations and disarmament. The connection to currencies was obvious enough. The depression had forced several countries off the gold standard, including, most ominously, Britain in 1931. The consequent cheapening of the currencies of the gold-less governments gave their exports an advantage in American markets. The League of Nations had proposed a world economic conference to negotiate an adjustment of currencies, of trade, and of other matters relating to the world economy. Hoover enthusiastically supported the conference, but preparations and complications had pushed its scheduled convening beyond his departure from office. Debt questions were supposed to be excluded from the world conference, at the insistence of the American government, which adopted the position that these were bilateral matters between the United States and its debtors. Many observers considered this stance a charade, for it strained the imagination to think that a conference on world economics could ignore one of the fundamental features of the world economy. But it provided Hoover reason to go ahead with discussions of the debts, to get those out of the way before the conference convened.

The disarmament question related to the economic questions in that arms cost money that most governments found in short supply. If the governments of the great powers—the ones that had agreed to the restrictions of the Washington Conference of the previous decade—could arrange to extend those restrictions, they might all improve their economic prospects without, they hoped, jeopardizing their security.

Hoover’s announcement of the appointment of the debt commission was both a response to the developing crisis and an effort to force Roosevelt’s hand. “Serious problems have now arisen, and we are bound to recognize and deal with them,” Hoover declared. To wait until March 4 would risk irreparable damage to the American economy and that of the broader world. “I propose, therefore, to seek the cooperation of President-elect Roosevelt in the organization of machinery for advancement of consideration of these problems.”

As Hoover intended, his announcement put Roosevelt in the uncomfortable position of either acquiescing in the announced policy or defying the president of the United States on a matter declared by the president to be essential to American welfare. Hoover was convinced of the correctness of his position, and he couldn’t believe that Roosevelt would risk the opprobrium that would follow a failure to lend a hand in this moment of peril.

He underestimated his rival. Or perhaps he overestimated the regard in which the American people still held him and his judgment. Had Hoover not been so overwhelmingly rejected at the polls, Roosevelt might have hesitated to cross him publicly on a matter of such weight. But Roosevelt recognized that his political authority, if not yet his legal authority, outweighed Hoover’s. On the same day that Hoover delivered his message to Congress, Roosevelt telegraphed the White House a rejection of Hoover’s approach. “It is my view,” he said, “that the questions of disarmament, intergovernmental debts, and permanent economic arrangements will be found to require selective treatment”—in contrast to the unified approach called for by Hoover. A debt commission continued to be a bad idea. The administration might reasonably conduct surveys of the debt question, but “these surveys should be limited to determining facts and exploring possibilities rather than fixing policies binding on the incoming administration.” The world economic conference should be kept separate from the debt and disarmament questions. “I recognize, of course, a relationship, but not an identity. Therefore I cannot go along with the thought that the personnel conducting the conversations should be identical.” The president’s proposal, at bottom, ignored the disparity that still existed between the two men. “It would be unwise for me to accept an apparent joint responsibility with you when, as a matter of constitutional fact, I would be wholly lacking in any authority.”

This one sentence summarized what everything came down to. Hoover wanted Roosevelt to share responsibility for policies over which he had no authority, and Roosevelt refused. The problem was inherent in the extended interregnum specified by the Constitution. But it was exacerbated by the distrust between Hoover and Roosevelt. Hoover sincerely believed that the policies Roosevelt espoused would ruin the country; the Republican president hoped to preempt those policies by locking Roosevelt into a framework of international commitments and expectations. Roosevelt naturally resisted. The voters had selected him and rejected Hoover; the president’s eleventh-hour efforts amounted, in Roosevelt’s view, to nothing less than a subversion of democracy, besides being wrongheaded on their merits.

ON JANUARY 2, 1933, Roosevelt found himself out of a job. Some observers had wondered why Roosevelt didn’t resign as governor months earlier, to free himself for the campaign and the transition. Rex Tugwell put the question to Basil O’Connor, a personal and professional friend of Roosevelt’s. “The best reason,” O’Connor answered, “is that he’s poor.”

Tugwell expressed surprise, and O’Connor explained. Roosevelt wasn’t poor by the standards of ordinary people, but he was poor by the standards of his class. The Roosevelts were an “extravagant family,” O’Connor said, and “not one of the lot ever thought of money except to spend it.” Sara Roosevelt still held the purse strings, and she didn’t hesitate to tighten them when she saw fit. Roosevelt’s lifestyle, starting with the ordinary expenses of servants, multiple homes, and travel, and compounded by the extraordinary costs associated with his disability, required a large and constant cash flow. His salary as governor didn’t cover the bills, but combined with income from his own portion of his father’s estate and from Eleanor’s inheritance, and with Sara’s dole, it allowed him to get by. To surrender that salary prematurely was too much to ask. O’Connor guessed that when Roosevelt handed over the governorship at the beginning of January 1933, he might have to borrow money to avoid cutbacks in his standard of living. Besides, the governor’s job included the governor’s mansion, which was a good place from which to run a campaign or direct a transition. The town house in Manhattan was too small, and the estate at Hyde Park too posh. At Hyde Park he’d have credibility problems berating Hoover and the Republican leadership for coddling the rich. The governor’s house in Albany wasn’t exactly spartan, but it belonged to the people and came with the post to which the people had elected Roosevelt.

Yet on January 2—January 1 being a Sunday—he didn’t have a choice. Roosevelt handed the house and the post over to Herbert Lehman. “In taking leave of you, my friends, my neighbors, and my associates, after four years in Albany, I could not fail to have many regrets at the parting,” he said. But he would carry his New York experience with him. “To maintain a government of definite action founded on liberal thought has been my aim.” So it would continue to be. “The crisis has brought new problems and, at the same time, new possibilities.” Roosevelt promised to keep New York in his thoughts while he served the country as a whole. “I shall have a friend in Albany,” he declared, looking at Lehman, “and he will have a friend in Washington.”

ROOSEVELT HAD FRIENDS; he also had enemies. This was something comparatively new in his experience. During his first fifty years—he had reached the half-century mark almost simultaneously with his announcement of his candidacy in January 1932—people had sometimes considered him shallow, even supercilious. More than a few had envied his inherited wealth and family connections, although the envy diminished after he contracted polio. A comparative handful had been bruised by his ambition. But almost no one worked up sufficient antipathy to consider him an enemy. He simply wasn’t that important.

Things changed with his nomination. During the campaign the Republicans characterized him as a dangerous radical. His “forgotten man” speech gave rise to charges that he was fomenting class warfare. His call for national planning conjured the specter of socialism. Soon the antipathy would escalate into visceral hatred; much of America’s upper crust would hiss at “that man” in the White House.

In February 1933 one person carried the hostility to murderous lengths. Roosevelt left Albany following the inauguration of Governor Lehman and headed south. He visited Washington for another unproductive meeting with Hoover and proceeded to Warm Springs, for rest and recreation. En route he toured the Tennessee Valley; at Muscle Shoals in northern Alabama he hinted at great plans he had for harnessing the Tennessee River “from the mountains of Virginia down to the Ohio.” After a week at Warm Springs, he traveled to Florida, where he embarked at Jacksonville on a cruise aboard the yacht of Vincent Astor. The cruise recalled his house boating days on the Larooco and carried Roosevelt and the other passengers to Miami on February 15. He spoke very briefly to the mayor and assembled guests, including the visiting mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak. Roosevelt praised the fishing while grumbling good-naturedly that he had gained ten pounds in as many days. “That means that among the other duties that I shall have to perform when I get north is taking those ten pounds off.”

Among the audience at Miami’s Bayfront Park was Giuseppe Zangara, a thirty-three-year-old Italian immigrant. Zangara had arrived in America in 1923, in the last wave of immigration before the restrictions specified by the 1924 reforms took effect. He became a naturalized citizen in 1926; at that point or perhaps earlier, as he started to pick up English, he began employing the English equivalent—Joseph—of his Christian name. According to his own later testimony he had conceived a mortal hatred for the rich and powerful while in his teens in Italy, although resentment toward his father, who had sent him to work at the age of six, seems to have colored his attitude toward authority as well. “Had you tried to kill in Italy?” he was subsequently asked. “Yes, the king,” he responded. “Why didn’t you kill the king?” “Because I didn’t have no chance.”

After clearing Ellis Island, Zangara settled in Paterson, New Jersey. He became a bricklayer—a union man—and worked steadily until 1926, by which time he had managed to save $2,500. At some point he developed stomach problems, which, together with his nest egg, prompted him to quit work. Thereafter he never held a regular job. He remained in Paterson during the early years of the depression, which touched him rather less than it did many of his neighbors. But his stomach got worse, and he interpreted its gnawing as a comment on the unfairness of life in a capitalist society. The pain sharpened in cold weather, and during the late autumn of 1932 he traveled to Miami seeking relief.

Yet his suffering continued, and he determined that the only remedy was the assassination of the American president. He would have gone after Hoover immediately, but the cold weather in the North persisted and he decided to wait till spring. At about the time he realized that by spring Hoover would no longer be president, he read in the Miami papers that President-elect Roosevelt was coming to town. His funds were running low, as he had discovered the dog races but not how to pick winners. Yet with eight dollars he purchased a five-shot .32-caliber revolver from a pawn dealer on Miami Avenue.

The newspapers had printed Roosevelt’s itinerary in detail, and Zangara met his boat at the dock. But the crowd and the close quarters there prevented him from getting an open shot. So he followed Roosevelt’s entourage to Bayfront Park. He waited amid the audience of more than ten thousand, assuming that a man of Roosevelt’s importance would speak for a long time. When Roosevelt, speaking into a portable microphone from the rear seat of an open car, finished after less than two minutes, Zangara was caught by surprise. Various dignitaries gathered around Roosevelt’s car to shake his hand, wish him well upon his presidency, and perhaps plant the seed of a federal appointment.

Chicago mayor Cermak was closest to Roosevelt when Zangara worked his way to within twenty-five feet of the car. Zangara, a short man, mounted a chair to get a clearer view of the president-elect. He pulled out the pistol and began shooting. The chair wobbled beneath him, and a woman standing nearby grabbed his arm. As a result, his five shots missed Roosevelt. One hit Cermak in the chest, wounding him grievously. Another hit Mrs. Joseph Gill, the wife of the president of Florida Power & Light, also causing serious injury. A third bullet creased the head of William Sinnott, a New York detective traveling with Roosevelt; a fourth nicked the scalp of a Miami resident; the fifth pierced the hand of a visitor from New Jersey.

Roosevelt was startled at the sound of the shots, but otherwise he displayed remarkable composure. “I heard what I thought was a firecracker, then several more,” he told reporters afterward. “The man talking with me was pulled back, and the chauffeur started the car.” At this point Roosevelt saw blood from one of those wounded. “I looked around and saw Mayor Cermak doubled up, and Mrs. Gill collapsing. Mrs. Gill was at the foot of the bandstand steps. As soon as she was hit she must have got up and started down the steps. She was slumped over at the bottom.”

Roosevelt ordered the driver to stop. The driver did so, a short distance from where the car had been. Roosevelt’s Secret Service detail countermanded the order, shouting at the driver to proceed, to get the president-elect away from the crowd. The driver hit the gas again. Roosevelt once more told him to stop, to make sure the wounded got to a hospital as quickly as possible. “I saw Mayor Cermak being carried. I motioned to have him put in the back of the car, which would be the first out. He was alive, but I didn’t think he was going to last. I put my left arm around him and my hand on his pulse, but I couldn’t find any pulse.”

Roosevelt ordered the driver to hurry to the nearest hospital. A Miami detective riding on the mudguard of the car looked at Cermak and said he was dying. Roosevelt agreed. But after a few blocks Cermak rallied. He straightened up a bit, and Roosevelt felt a pulse. “I held him all the way to the hospital, and his pulse constantly improved.” The car couldn’t go fast enough. “That trip to the hospital seemed thirty miles long. I talked to Mayor Cermak nearly all the way. I remember I said, ‘Tony, keep quiet—don’t move. It won’t hurt you if you keep quiet.’”

Cermak was the worst off of the wounded, and while the others were treated and began healing, the mayor hovered near death. In the meantime the authorities interrogated Zangara, who after expending his bullets had made no attempt to flee. The police descended upon him, and he was taken to jail on the nineteenth floor of Miami’s high-rise city hall. There the Dade County sheriff, state prosecutors, and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation questioned him to determine, most crucially, whether he had acted alone or as part of a conspiracy. “Was anybody with you?” they demanded. “No,” he said. “Nobody in Miami?” “No, no place.” How had he come to Miami? “By bus.” How long had he been there? “Two or three months.”

It was to these interrogators that Zangara revealed his animus against the rich and powerful—against “kings and presidents,” as he now put it. But he had shot several people besides Roosevelt, the questioners said. Had he intended to kill them too? “No, just him.” Had he realized he might hit other people? “No, just him. Just President.” Why did he want to kill the president? “Because the President—rich people—capitalists—spoil me when I’m six years old.” Did he hate President Roosevelt as a man? “As a man I like him all right.” But as a president? “President—always the same bunch.”

ROOSEVELT HAD INTENDED to leave for New York shortly after his Bayfront Park speech. But with Mayor Cermak’s life in the balance, he decided to remain in Miami. He stayed at the hospital long enough to learn that Cermak’s condition had stabilized and to speak with the other victims and then returned to the Astor yacht in the harbor.

Ray Moley had measured Roosevelt’s intellect during the previous year, but he had never observed his courage under—literal—fire. He was most impressed. “Roosevelt’s nerve had held absolutely throughout the evening,” Moley wrote. “But the real test in such cases comes afterward, when the crowds, to whom nothing but courage can be shown, are gone. The time for the letdown among his intimates was at hand. All of us were prepared, sympathetically, understandingly, for any reaction that might come from Roosevelt now that the tension was over and he was alone with us. For anything, that is, except what happened.” Or, rather, what did not happen. “There was nothing—not so much as the twitching of a muscle, the mopping of a brow, or even the hint of false gaiety—to indicate that it wasn’t any other evening in any other place. Roosevelt was simply himself—easy, confident, poised, to all appearances unmoved.”

The attempted assassination wasn’t a total surprise to Roosevelt. As a lifelong student of the presidency, he hardly needed reminding that three presidents had fallen to assassins’ bullets. Nor could he forget that Uncle Ted had been shot and nearly killed during the campaign of 1912. (As it happened, Theodore’s son Kermit had been on the Astor yacht and was with Roosevelt in Miami that day.) “FDR had talked to me once or twice during the campaign about the possibility that someone would try to assassinate him,” Moley remarked. “To that extent, I knew, he was prepared for Zangara’s attempt.”

Moley continued: “But it is one thing to talk philosophically about assassination, and another to face it. And I confess that I have never in my life seen anything more magnificent than Roosevelt’s calm that night.”

THE WHEELS OF justice moved more swiftly in those days, at least in Florida, than they would later. Zangara was brought to trial five days after the shooting and pleaded guilty to four counts of attempted murder. The lawyers assigned to his defense raised the possibility of an insanity plea, but he refused. “My client has insisted on his guilt,” the head of the defense team told the court. “He scoffs at the idea that he may be insane.”

Neither was he repentant. “Don’t be stingy,” he shouted when the judge sentenced him to eighty years in prison. “Give me more—give me one hundred years!” Prior to sentencing, the judge allowed the defendant to be questioned, in order that the court could assess his state of mind. Zangara reiterated his indictment of capitalism. “Capitalism kill me,” he said. “My stomach hurt all the time. I kill someone—that makes it fifty-fifty.” Asked if he was sorry he had attempted to kill Roosevelt, he replied, “No, no, no—I am only sorry because I did not kill. I am sorry about nothing. Put me in the electric chair.”

This possibility remained. At the time of the trial, the other victims were on the road to full recovery, and Cermak seemed out of danger. But the state’s attorney reserved the option to retry Zangara for murder in the event Cermak died. (Cermak was well enough to comment on the proceedings. “They certainly mete out justice pretty fast in this state,” he said. “If the law could be enforced this swiftly in other states…it would have a great tendency to check crime.”)

But the trial and sentencing didn’t end the investigation into the possibility of a conspiracy. The FBI received numerous reports of links between Zangara and anarchist cells, between Zangara and the Communist party, between Zangara and an organization called the Sons of Italy, and even between Zangara and the Black Hand, the terrorist group behind the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which had touched off the World War. Another angle was that Cermak, rather than Roosevelt, was the real target. By one version of this story, Chicago gangsters were sore at Cermak for cracking down on their illegal operations. By another, they were upset at him for trying to grab a piece of the black market action for himself. Either way, they hired Zangara to eliminate Cermak. The fact that Zangara emphatically denied intending to kill the mayor simply demonstrated how clever the gangsters were.

The FBI pursued the leads in their several directions. The agency examined Zangara’s bank records; it tracked his whereabouts in the months and years before the shooting. It followed up alleged sightings of Zangara in unlikely places and examined possible connections between Zangara and persons reported to have spoken especially ill of the incoming president, including one Italian immigrant who pointed at a newspaper photograph of Zangara and muttered, “Damn fool, worthless shot, can’t hit anything”—this according to a man who overheard the remarks in a Manhattan barbershop and relayed them to the FBI.

None of the leads survived scrutiny. Meanwhile, however, Cermak took a sudden turn for the worse and died. Zangara was brought to trial again, this time for first-degree murder. He again pleaded guilty, again defiantly. He was sentenced to death, and was executed on March 20. “Lousy capitalists!” he shouted as the straps of the electric chair were tightened around his chest and arms. “All capitalists lousy bunch of crooks!”

ROOSEVELT COULD hardly have devised a more dramatic backdrop for his inauguration. The country was in crisis, and the man elected to lead it through its moment of peril narrowly escaped assassination. Hoover added an element of petty bitterness to the drama. Defying tradition, the departing president refused to invite the Roosevelts to dinner the night before the inauguration, substituting an awkward tea. And when Roosevelt tried to end the awkwardness and afford the president a graceful exit from the room, Hoover simply aggravated the discomfort. “Mr. President, as you know, it is rather difficult for me to move in a hurry,” Roosevelt said. “It takes me a little while to get up, and I know how busy you must be. So please don’t wait for me.” Hoover stood up and fixed Roosevelt with a glare. “Mr. Roosevelt, after you have been president for a while, you will learn that the President of the United States waits for no one.” He stalked off, leaving his wife to handle the good-byes.

Hoover’s mood hadn’t improved the next morning. Roosevelt began the long day with a private service at St. John’s Episcopal Church, across Lafayette Square from the White House (and just east of where Henry Adams’s house, demolished for a hotel a few years earlier, had been). Endicott Peabody, seventy-five years old but still headmaster of the Groton School, conducted the service, which was attended by members of the Roosevelt family and close associates. Roosevelt valued the service for its own sake; he also thought it set a good tone for the first day of his new administration.

At eleven o’clock the car that would carry him to the inaugural ceremonies swung by the Mayflower Hotel, where he and Eleanor had spent the night. Roosevelt took his place in the back seat, and the driver proceeded to the White House to pick up Hoover. The outgoing president took a final look at the mansion but scarcely glanced at Roosevelt as he climbed in. The open car drove up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, with crowds cheering on either side. Roosevelt initially adopted the respectful posture that the cheers were for the (still) president and declined to acknowledge them. But within blocks the fiction became unsustainable, and he began smiling and waving his silk top hat at the crowd. The anger radiating from Hoover only intensified.

At the Capitol, Roosevelt let Hoover get out of the car, then took the arm of his son James and entered the Senate side of the building. He observed the swearing-in of the new senators and of John Nance Garner as vice president, and he witnessed the historic adjournment of the last lame duck session of Congress. (The seemingly endless interregnum had prompted approval of the Twentieth Amendment, which shifted presidential inaugurations to January 20 and canceled the post-election meetings of Congress.)

At one o’clock the president-elect and the rest of the inaugural party moved outdoors, to the east steps of the Capitol. A throng of one hundred thousand waited impatiently. Roosevelt’s demeanor was uncharacteristically serious. Arthur Krock was surprised by Roosevelt’s somber mood, but he thought it in keeping with the general feeling in Washington. “Though the city was gay with flags and lively with the music of bands and cheers for the marchers in the inaugural parade which followed the oath taking,” the New York Times reporter wrote, “the atmosphere which surrounded the change of government in the United States was comparable to that which might be found in a beleaguered capital in wartime.”

Roosevelt had been preparing his inaugural address for a week. By his own later account he wrote the initial draft in four hours at Hyde Park on the night of February 27. His longhand sentences were then typed and polished, and reviewed and repolished during the next several days. Roosevelt amended the text by hand up to the last minute and improvised even from the final draft. After taking his oath of office—unusually repeating the words read from the Constitution, by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, rather than saying simply “I do”—the new president turned to the great crowd and, with unsmiling face, declared, “This is a day of national consecration, and I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our nation impels.”

Hoover was standing next to Roosevelt, and his dour expression became a grimace as he anticipated yet another attack on his administration. But Roosevelt proceeded with words of encouragement and hope. “This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper…. Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Before long this line about having to fear only fear would be hailed as a landmark of presidential rhetoric. At the time it didn’t seem so, not least since it was patently false. Americans had plenty to fear, starting with massive unemployment, widespread hunger, and a collapsing financial system. Yet coming from one who had just survived an assassination attempt, following a decadelong battle with polio, it struck a reassuring tone.

More noticed at the moment was a phrase that corroborated Hoover’s grimace and furnished the headlines for the next day’s news accounts of the inauguration. Roosevelt assailed the “unscrupulous money changers” of Wall Street as those responsible for America’s plight. “Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply,” he said. “Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence.” Waxing biblical, Roosevelt declared, at once accusingly and promisingly: “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.”

Other matters demanded attention. “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work,” Roosevelt said. This task would be accomplished in part “by direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war.” It would be aided by a reconfiguration of the American economy. “We must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.” As means to such a vague end, Roosevelt advanced suggestions that could be variously interpreted. He called for “definite efforts to raise the values of agricultural products,” for “insistence that the federal, state, and local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced,” and for “an adequate but sound currency.” On the foreign front he was somewhat clearer: “Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are, in point of time and necessity, secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy.”

Though Roosevelt’s words left listeners uncertain as to what his administration would do, they made plain that the administration would do something. “We must act, and act quickly,” Roosevelt said. No longer would the federal government wait for the business cycle to turn and the economy to correct itself. Roosevelt announced that he would call a special session of Congress. He expected the legislature to rise to the challenge confronting it. But if Congress failed in its duty, he would take additional steps. “I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require…. I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

No new president, not even Lincoln amid the secession crisis of 1861, had spoken so boldly of the power he required and would insist upon. The American people were demanding much, and they deserved all that government could accomplish for them. “They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.”

22.

SARA ROOSEVELT SAT WITH HER SON ON THE PLATFORM AT THE INAUGURATION, beside Eleanor and the children. She observed the ceremony with the pride any mother would feel on such an occasion, mixed with some stubborn residual conviction that Franklin would have been better off retiring to Hyde Park after contracting polio. If her thoughts extended beyond her son and his accomplishments, she might have reflected on the remarkable changes America had experienced during her lifetime. She wouldn’t have put it quite so, but the country had undergone a capitalist revolution, a thoroughgoing economic and social transformation in which an agrarian society had given way to one based on manufacturing; in which land as the predominant form of property had been eclipsed by bank accounts and corporate shares; in which small producers had been absorbed, marginalized, or extinguished by giant enterprises; in which the farmsteads and villages of a rural people had been overtaken by the cities of an urban nation; in which muscle-powered transport had fallen far behind the locomotion of steam and internal combustion; in which handwritten letters as the principal means of communication over distance had been supplanted by telegraph, telephone, and radio; in which a population descended primarily from Northwestern Europeans and West Africans had been augmented by the arrival of millions from Southern and Eastern Europe; in which the Protestants who founded America now jostled with Catholics and Jews; in which material life grew richer but more precarious and less equal.

The capitalist revolution had triggered, after the turn of the twentieth century, a democratic counterrevolution, as the institutions of government adjusted to the modern terms of economic existence. Progressives led by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had tamed the most egregious of the trusts, curbed the power of the private bankers, established standards of quality for food and drugs, opened the political process to greater popular participation, and generally reasserted the principle that even the greatest capitalist entities were ultimately responsible to the American people, acting through their democratic institutions.

After the World War the balance had shifted again, back in the direction of capitalism. The business of America, Calvin Coolidge had said, was business, and business largely had its way. The boom of the 1920s appeared proof of the efficacy of modern capitalism, which, Herbert Hoover promised, would carry the country to a new level of enduring prosperity.

The stock market crash had punctured the pretense of the New Era, and the depression had gone far toward discrediting capitalism. What remained to be seen—and for Franklin Roosevelt perhaps to help determine—was whether capitalism’s stumble would produce a democratic resurgence. In his campaign Roosevelt made much of the forgotten man, of the plight of the ordinary people of America, of the interdependence of all classes and occupational groups. Capitalist individualism—the philosophy of every man for himself—no longer persuaded. Whether democratic collectivism—the belief that we’re all in this together—could do better was the question of the hour.

It could hardly do worse. The late winter of 1933 was the darkest moment in American life since the Civil War, which for all the destruction it wreaked at least was comprehensible to ordinary men and women. The most discouraging aspect of the Great Depression was that it defied common logic. People went hungry while farmers dumped milk in ditches and left crops standing in the fields. The thriftiest savers, cautious souls who had shunned the stock market as reckless speculation, saw their carefully tended nest eggs vanish overnight as banks collapsed. Factories sat idle while millions wanted nothing more than to go back to work.

The magnitude of the disaster could only be estimated, not least because the Hoover administration hadn’t been eager to quantify the bad news. But the evidence available to a subsequent generation of historical statisticians indicated that by 1933 the total production of American farms and factories had fallen by a third, in real terms, since 1929. (The nominal decline was greater but included a sharp fall in prices as well.) One-quarter of American workers were unemployed in 1933: twelve million men and women, by the most plausible estimates. Many more were underemployed—working part-time or at jobs beneath their skills and training. Five thousand banks had failed or were failing, typically leaving their depositors without recourse. The stock market had lost three-quarters of its value since October 1929, wiping out millions more. Half a million home mortgages had been foreclosed, rendering the owners at once bankrupt and homeless. As property values plummeted, property tax receipts shriveled, forcing cities and states to lay off workers or pay them in IOUs.

Hunger scoured the land. Generations accustomed to pulling their own weight often refused to seek organized relief until they were starving; in other locales the relief simply fell short of what was required. Individuals and families hit the road looking for work and shelter; the Hoovervilles that sprang up in every city and many towns were merely the most visible manifestation of the tide of homelessness that swept the country. Young men and women postponed marriage; the nation’s birth rate fell by a third.

Old people were particularly vulnerable. Guaranteed pensions were a rarity in the 1930s; workers expected to save for their retirements or work until they died. But bank failures stole their savings, and unemployment their livelihoods. In the human nature of things they were less mobile than the young, often because they were sicker. Some moved in with their children; millions simply suffered alone.

Franklin Roosevelt in March 1933 couldn’t know the extent of the calamity; no one could. But if his inaugural address sounded like a war message, it fairly reflected the fact that the depression of the 1930s had done—and was doing—the kind of damage commonly associated with wars. It destroyed lives and livelihoods; it uprooted families and sowed despair; it blighted a whole generation. It cast a grimmer pall over America, and over the American future, than any development of the lifetime of Roosevelt and his generation.

AT THE MOMENT of Roosevelt’s inauguration the American banking system verged on dissolution. Banking law in America in the early 1930s was a federal-state hodgepodge. National banks—which was to say, nationally chartered banks; individual bank corporations didn’t yet operate across state lines—were controlled by federal law, while state banks followed state laws. Some banks, both national and state, were members of the Federal Reserve system; others were not. As various governors watched banks in their states succumb to “runs”—uncontrolled withdrawal demands by depositors, which frequently ended with the failure of the banks—several pondered the drastic step of declaring “bank holidays,” that is, simply closing the banks to business. The idea, or hope, was that the panic would pass: that if depositors were temporarily prevented from withdrawing their funds, they would calm down and decide they really didn’t need the money. In fact most neither needed nor really wanted the money. Bank deposits earned interest; cash in a can in the garden or in a shoe box under the bed did not. If the depositors could have been sure their money was safe in the banks, nearly all of them would have been happy to leave it there. With this in mind, the governor of Louisiana declared a state bank holiday in early February. Michigan did the same at midmonth, followed by Maryland, Indiana, Arkansas, and Ohio. At the beginning of March twenty other states closed the doors of their banks. By inauguration day, the American banking system was nearly at a standstill.

The crisis in banking daunted Roosevelt but also afforded him an opportunity. Hoover and the Republicans blamed the new president for the financial paralysis, charging that his attacks on business had sapped the confidence that in ordinary times underwrote the banking system. Some conservatives, apparently including the former president, detected a design in Roosevelt’s words and actions; by encouraging the collapse, they said, Roosevelt was paving the way to socialism. Roosevelt had no such plan, as events would soon prove. But the paralysis of the banks left him free to address the problem in almost any way he chose. His first step was to make the de facto national bank holiday official. Inauguration day was a Saturday; on Sunday the banks were all closed anyway; and at one o’clock on Monday morning Roosevelt declared a four-day national bank holiday. From Monday through Thursday, his executive order said, “all banking transactions shall be suspended.” In particular, no bank or branch “shall pay out, export, earmark, or permit the withdrawal or transfer in any manner or by any device whatsoever, of any gold or silver coin or bullion or currency or take any action which might facilitate the hoarding thereof.”

Roosevelt’s closing of the banks was the kind of bold action his inaugural address had promised. Whether it was legal was another matter. He cited a section of the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act as justification. The act had never been formally repealed, but a body of legal theory held that that law, along with other wartime legislation, had expired upon the signing of the peace treaty with Germany in 1921. (After the Senate rejected Wilson’s Treaty of Versailles, the United States had negotiated separate treaties with its wartime adversaries.) Roosevelt solicited the opinion of Thomas Walsh, a Montana senator who was his first choice to be attorney general. Walsh delivered the opinion Roosevelt wanted: that the law was still in effect and that it allowed the president to close the country’s banks. But Walsh never had to defend this opinion before a court of law, for he died on March 2 while traveling to Washington for the inauguration.

Had the emergency not seemed so dire, and had the banking system not been paralyzed anyway, Roosevelt surely would have met greater resistance. But even the Wall Street Journal, the principal organ of institutional capital, acknowledged that the unprecedented circumstances required strong measures. “A common adversity has much subdued the recalcitrance of groups bent upon self-interest,” the paper observed. “All of us the country over are now ready to make sacrifices to a common necessity and to accept realities as we would not have done three months ago.”

Moreover, the brief duration of the bank holiday meant that Roosevelt’s affront to the corporate sector, if affront it was, would be passing. And it would shortly be submitted to Congress for approval or rejection. Even as Roosevelt closed the banks he acted to reopen Congress, calling the legislature into emergency session. The lawmakers would meet at noon on Thursday, March 9; their first order of business would be banking reform.

The nature of the reform remained to be seen—and to be decided. Hoover and the conspiracy-minded conservatives gave Roosevelt too much credit for foresight and conceptual coherence. Within days it became apparent that the hallmark of Roosevelt’s New Deal was improvisation. “I have been so occupied since noon on Saturday that I have not had a chance to prepare any formal remarks,” Roosevelt told the annual governors’ conference on Monday, March 6. But he extemporized regarding his “four or five main objectives” in closing the banks and calling the legislature into special session. The first objective was to prevent further withdrawals from the banks. The second was “to provide some form of circulating medium for the country in addition to the outstanding currency,” so much of which had gone into hiding. A third was to arrange the timely reopening of the banks and their subsequent smooth operation. A fourth—and here he came closest to Hoover’s dark forebodings—was to reform the banking system to prevent a repetition of the current crisis. “We want if possible to have a general banking system,” Roosevelt explained, “that is to say one covering national banks and state banks, as uniform as possible throughout the country.”

NO COMPETENT commander goes to war without able lieutenants. Ray Moley, Rex Tugwell, Adolf Berle, and the other members of the Brain Trust had been indispensable during the campaign, running a kind of graduate seminar for a law school dropout who wanted to be president. Their ideas and words continued to inform Roosevelt’s thinking and speeches after the inauguration. But putting the ideas into action required expertise and political heft the professors lacked. Roosevelt had been watching presidents and taking mental notes since Uncle Ted entered the White House; he had seen cabinets go right and cabinets go wrong, watched brilliant ideas languish for lack of support in Congress, witnessed the frustration that followed failure to cultivate those persons who could make or break an administration. He intended a revolution in governance, and he knew enough to start with a strong cabinet.

Yet not too strong. Woodrow Wilson had erred by making William Jennings Bryan his secretary of state. The error was natural: Wilson wanted to appease an important constituency in the Democratic party. And Wilson had no way of knowing a world war was about to break out. Yet having a pacifist for chief diplomat during wartime handcuffed the administration, and Bryan’s abrupt departure during the Lusitania crisis dealt Wilson’s presidency a serious blow.

Roosevelt learned a further lesson from Wilson. The unforgivable failure of Wilson’s administration was the president’s failure to persuade the Senate to ratify the Versailles treaty. Here again the problem wasn’t entirely Wilson’s, or at least not within Wilson’s control: his sudden incapacity at the climax of the treaty fight left the pro-treaty forces leaderless. But Wilson had prepared the ground for defeat by ignoring the Senate in the negotiation of the treaty and in the formulation of foreign policy generally.

Roosevelt took care to avoid both of Wilson’s mistakes in choosing a secretary of state. The leading prospect for the position was Owen Young, the president of General Electric, who had headed the second international debt renegotiation plan of the 1920s and was considered reassuring to both the American business community and the transatlantic financial world. Young had another mark in his favor: amid the efforts by Al Smith to stop Roosevelt’s candidacy before the Democratic convention, Young had been mentioned as a compromise candidate. But he took himself out of the running, leaving Roosevelt to sweep to victory.

For such reasons Roosevelt had to consider Young, and to make the considering obvious. He talked about Young with Moley and Berle and Louis Howe, and let them mention the conversations to reporters. But Moley perceived that Roosevelt was never comfortable with the idea of Young as secretary of state. “I got the sense that he didn’t feel he could run around in his mental carpet slippers in Young’s presence,” Moley wrote. Moley overestimated Roosevelt’s need for pajama talk with his cabinet secretaries, but he was right that Roosevelt didn’t really want Young. When Young objected that his wife’s illness would prevent him from doing justice to the senior position in Roosevelt’s cabinet, the president-elect didn’t contradict him.

Roosevelt settled instead on Cordell Hull, an eleven-term congressman from Tennessee whom voters in the Volunteer State had elevated to the Senate in 1930. Hull’s experience in the Senate offered reassurance that whatever treaties the Roosevelt administration negotiated would receive a fair hearing in the upper house, while the long time it took Hull to reach the Senate suggested a lack of the kind of ambition that might distract or disrupt the administration. “I was really almost thunderstruck,” Hull said of being offered the State Department, and his amazement reassured Roosevelt.

In the House and in the Senate, Hull had distinguished himself as an advocate of tariff reduction. This placed him in the mainstream of the Democratic party and promised to keep him busy in the State Department, a prospect that again appealed to Roosevelt, who likewise favored tariff reduction but didn’t intend to waste much of his own time and political capital on such a long-term and comparatively thankless project. The only question about Hull was whether he would take the job. In fact he required a month to accept Roosevelt’s offer. He explained that the Senate suited him quite well, that foreign policy wasn’t his strength, and that Mrs. Hull didn’t look forward to the entertaining the wife of a secretary of state was expected to do. Roosevelt waved away Hull’s objections, letting him know that the nation needed him at the State Department, that he underestimated his knowledge of foreign affairs, and that Mrs. Hull could stay home if she didn’t like fancy dinners. A slightly larger impediment arose when several Democratic senators told Moley that Hull lacked the breadth required of an international statesman. “It’s an open secret that he’s got only one string to his bow,” one of the senators said of Hull’s preoccupation with tariffs. “Every time he makes his speech on tariffs, he empties the Senate.” When Moley passed this objection along, Roosevelt brushed it aside too. “Tell the senators I’ll be glad to have some fine idealism in the State Department,” he said.

After State, the most important cabinet position was the Treasury. Here the obvious choice was Carter Glass. The diminutive Virginian reminded some contemporaries of James Madison, others of Alexander Hamilton. Glass had been in Congress as long as Hull and had held a cabinet post as well: Treasury secretary for two years during Wilson’s second term. He knew more about money than anyone else in the Democratic party, having helped author the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and kept a close eye on the Fed and the currency since.

This expertise was precisely why Roosevelt had to offer Glass the Treasury post, and why Glass ended up not taking it. Glass was a sound-money man, opposing devaluation of the dollar; he was Herbert Hoover’s favorite Democrat. By offering Glass the Treasury, Roosevelt got credit for giving Glass’s views serious credence. He also made an ally of Glass. But even as Roosevelt informed Glass that he was the best man for the Treasury job, he acknowledged the strength of Glass’s counterargument that he could serve the country better in the Senate. When Glass pleaded poor health, Roosevelt let him know he understood about health problems and how they could limit a man’s options. The outcome was just what Roosevelt wanted. Glass declined the offer “with fervent good wishes for you and your administration” and a pledge that “I shall ever be ready to serve your administration to the full extent of my capabilities.”

Roosevelt settled on William Woodin, a Republican industrialist, director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and trustee of the Warm Springs Foundation who also happened to be a personal friend. Woodin’s Wall Street and commercial connections caused informed observers to assume he favored sound money—just as Roosevelt knew they would. But Woodin kept his views to himself—just as Roosevelt knew he would. Roosevelt didn’t intend to be his own Treasury secretary, but he took comfort in knowing that Woodin wouldn’t be overly independent. (He meanwhile got a laugh from Louis Howe’s method of casting his vote for the Treasury post. Afraid that word would leak, Howe wired Roosevelt in code: “Prefer a wooden roof to a glass roof over swimming pool.” Roosevelt read the message, and then read it again, wondering what Howe was talking about. When he realized it was a comment on the Treasury position—Woodin rather than Glass—he roared with delight.)

The remaining cabinet positions were less central to Roosevelt’s immediate plans. Thomas Walsh, the Montana senator, represented an additional nod to the Senate; when Walsh died before the inauguration, Roosevelt had to scramble to find another person for attorney general. Homer Cummings of Connecticut was known to favor Roosevelt’s views on important policy matters, having joined the Roosevelt camp long before the convention. Roosevelt had intended for Cummings to be governor general of the Philippines, but upon Walsh’s death he reassigned him to the Justice job. Henry A. Wallace had been consulting with Roosevelt for months on agriculture; besides being better versed in the problems facing farmers than just about anyone else in America, the Iowa editor was, like Woodin, a Republican. Roosevelt never forgot that the Republicans remained the majority party in the country; whenever he could bring a Republican aboard without compromising his overall objectives, he was pleased to do so. Wallace got the Agriculture Department.

Harold Ickes landed Interior, which shared with Agriculture the responsibility for America’s land-use policies. Roosevelt didn’t know Ickes at all; after inviting him for an interview, along with some other candidates for administration posts, Roosevelt looked at a list of their names and called out, “Which one of you is Ikes?”

“Ickes, Mr. President,” the Chicago lawyer answered, shortening the first of the two syllables.

“Oh, so that’s how you pronounce it.”

Ickes was yet another Republican, which counted in his favor, and a progressive, which did, too. Beyond that, Roosevelt found him engaging. “I liked the cut of his jib,” he told Moley.

The Labor Department went to Frances Perkins. Roosevelt was determined to nominate the first woman to a cabinet post, and Labor was the likeliest spot, since in those days it included most federal welfare programs. Roosevelt considered Ruth Bryan Owen, the daughter of William Jennings Bryan, for the position but decided on Perkins instead. The selection of either woman was expected to ruffle feathers among union leaders, who had heretofore furnished the secretaries of labor. But New Yorker Perkins was less a stretch than Nebraska native Bryan Owen. Besides, Roosevelt knew Perkins personally and had valued her work as New York’s industrial commissioner.

Yet not many other people knew Perkins, and there were many people Perkins didn’t know. Ray Moley remembered seeing Perkins and Harold Ickes in Roosevelt’s parlor on Sixty-fifth Street. They were clearly strangers to each other. Moley broke the ice. “As you will eventually meet anyhow,” he said, “give me the pleasure of introducing the secretary of the interior to the secretary of labor.”

“GENERALLY SPEAKING, it is an average group of Presidential advisers,” Arthur Krock declared of Roosevelt’s cabinet. “Its composite trait seems to me to be diligence; brilliance it lacks completely.” Roosevelt wouldn’t have disagreed. The president didn’t want to be overshadowed by his advisers—didn’t want them to have or develop independent reputations or constituencies. Some of his motive was simply ego: having reached the top of the greasy pole, he wished for the world to see him as the great man he was convinced he was. But much was political strategy. The progressive revolution he intended would elicit plenty of resistance on its own; for his administration to get caught up in the quarreling that typically occurred when cabinet posts developed into fiefdoms would add unacceptably to his problems.

There was yet another element that contributed to Roosevelt’s preference for complaisant cabinet secretaries. To a degree that would become clearer with time, Roosevelt’s style of leadership involved setting his subordinates at cross-purposes with one another. The competition that ensued would ensure—or was supposed to ensure—that alternative policies received the fullest airing before Roosevelt himself stepped in and decided which way to go. Sometimes the advisers involved would know that others were on the same task; sometimes they wouldn’t until Roosevelt decided against them.

Roosevelt’s style of decision-making entailed certain risks. The duplication of effort could waste time and resources. The competition among advisers could fray nerves and ultimately alienate the losers, who might then cause problems for the administration. By concentrating power in Roosevelt’s hands, it could overwork him, threatening his health, or overwhelm him, leading to tardy, hastily conceived, or simply bad decisions.

Grace Tully noticed something about Roosevelt’s cabinet that may have occurred by accident or perhaps by the president’s design. Tully had begun working for Roosevelt in Albany, as assistant to Roosevelt’s secretary, Missy LeHand. She followed her bosses to Washington and remained with Roosevelt throughout his presidency. “So far as I was able to judge,” Tully said, “no two members of the Roosevelt cabinet were ever real friends. There were the dinners given cabinet members by the President, and there was now and then a poker game held in Harold Ickes’ or Henry Morgenthau’s house.” Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Hudson Valley neighbor, replaced Will Woodin at Treasury after declining health forced Woodin’s resignation at the end of 1933. “But beyond these random and infrequent social events, the contacts between cabinet members were largely of an official character.”

Much closer personally—to one another and to the president—were Roosevelt’s less senior advisers. Louis Howe, having accomplished his life’s goal by making Roosevelt president, received the post of president’s personal secretary. Of all Roosevelt’s official family, Howe was the only one who called him by his given name, and the one who got the first and last words on all matters of substance. Roosevelt put Brain Trusters Moley and Tugwell on the federal payroll, making Moley an assistant to Cordell Hull at the State Department and Tugwell an aide to Henry Wallace at Agriculture. Jim Farley was appointed postmaster general, the traditional slot for campaign managers. The tradition survived from the pre–civil service days of the spoils system, and although the postmaster now had much less patronage to bestow, the practice continued to reflect the fact that neither campaign managers nor postmasters typically had much influence over policy, as opposed to politics.

PRESS CONFERENCES had been a feature of White House life since Theodore Roosevelt, feeling sorry for the stringers assigned by their papers to keep an eye on the president’s movements and visitors, invited them to come in out of the rain. TR held press sessions irregularly, and he insisted that he not be quoted or, in most cases, even attributed. When he wished to speak as president, he did so through the formal channels of written messages and set speeches.

Press conferences were institutionalized under TR’s successors. The typical session with Wilson was something between a lecture and a seminar, with both of which Wilson was familiar from his days as a professor. The World War put a crimp on Wilson’s candor, as a slip of the tongue might compromise military secrets or America’s position with respect to other countries. Between his concern for confidentiality and the general duress of the war, Wilson suspended his news conferences; after his 1919 stroke they never resumed.

Warren Harding had been a pressman himself and was happy to restore journalists’ access to the White House. Yet he too discovered the limits American diplomacy placed on presidential frankness, when he said too much during the Washington Conference. An angry Charles Evans Hughes would have suspended the press conferences again had the matter been his to determine, but Harding resisted, and eventually the president and secretary of state compromised. Harding would answer written questions submitted in advance. This procedure gave him time to prepare answers and if necessary check them with his cabinet secretaries. A further stipulation forbade reporters from revealing which questions the president declined to answer.

Calvin Coolidge kept the requirement of written questions and allowed himself to be quoted in reply, but only with his explicit permission. Herbert Hoover elaborated on this scheme, devising three categories for the information he divulged: written statements that could be quoted and attributed to the president, extemporaneous remarks attributable to “official sources,” and sensitive information that must not be cited at all. Hoover’s system might have worked had he possessed a more engaging personality or had his perception of presidential responsibility not impelled him to put a uniformly positive gloss on the calamities the country was experiencing. The news corps came to distrust him, and the distrust exacerbated Hoover’s reticence. The press conferences grew painful for all concerned.

Roosevelt’s relations with the press had always been good, from his days as a state senator to his most recent experiences in Albany and on the campaign trail. More than any president since Theodore Roosevelt, he loved to talk—and even more than TR, he liked to listen to others talk back. Beyond that, his disability, which in another person might have provided an excuse to keep the press at a distance, became for Roosevelt a reason to let the correspondents get close. He didn’t stand at a podium in addressing them; he sat behind the desk in his office and let the correspondents gather round. They did so with pleasure, as many as two hundred crowding the room, and the ones in front sometimes being pushed right onto Roosevelt’s desk.

At Roosevelt’s first session with the reporters, on the morning of March 8, he explained the ground rules. “My hope is that these conferences are going to be merely enlarged versions of the kind of very delightful family conferences I have been holding in Albany for the last four years,” he said. “I am told that what I am about to do will become impossible, but I am going to try it anyway.” He would eliminate the requirement that questions be in writing, he said, adding, “I see no reason why I should not talk to you ladies and gentlemen off the record just the way I have been doing in Albany and the way I used to do it in the Navy Department down here.” Some questions he would decline to answer, for reasons of discretion, policy, or plain ignorance. “There will be a great many questions you will ask about that I don’t know enough to answer.” Hypotheticals he would reject on principle.

Roosevelt said that he and Stephen Early, whom he had made his principal spokesman, had discussed how they wanted to handle attributions. “Steve and I thought that it was best that street news for use out of here should always be without direct quotations. In other words, I don’t want to be directly quoted, with the exception that direct quotations will be given out by Steve in writing.” Two other categories of news would be treated differently. “The first is ‘background information,’ which means any material which can be used by all of you on your own authority and responsibility and must not be attributed to the White House, because I don’t want to have to revive the Ananias Club.” The Ananias Club—named for the early Christian said to have dropped dead for lying to God—was the exile Theodore Roosevelt imposed on journalists who broke his reporting rules; some of those present at this first conference were old enough to remember TR’s limbo, as their nervous laughter revealed.

The second category was off-the-record information. This was confidential material intended for only those present at a conference. As sharing of such information had caused problems under Coolidge and Hoover, Roosevelt elaborated: “There is one thing I want to say right now on which I think you will go along with me. I want to ask you not to repeat this ‘off the record’ confidential information either to your own editors or to associates who are not here, because there is always the danger that while you people might not violate the rule, somebody may forget to say, ‘This is off the record and confidential,’ and the other party may use it in a story.”

IN THE BEST of circumstances Roosevelt’s administration might have eased into its responsibilities—might have had the benefit of the equivalent of a shakedown cruise. But like the destroyer that carried Roosevelt to Europe in 1918, his administration received its shakedown under full battle conditions. Roosevelt closed the banks on March 6; he had to figure out how to reopen them on March 10. The bank holiday would have mitigated the panic by then—at least he could hope so—but it wouldn’t by itself have altered the underlying weaknesses in the banking system. The American banking industry in 1933 suffered from the same problem that afflicted farming and manufacturing: excess capacity relative to demand. The banking business had boomed during the 1920s as demand for banking services tracked the surge in the stock market and business generally. The bust of 1929 and afterward had shrunk the demand without immediately shrinking the supply.

Another factor contributed to the banks’ distress. The failure of the Federal Reserve to prevent the drastic contraction of the money supply had deprived the banking system of a large part of its liquidity. As the money dried up, so did the ability of the banks to meet their depositors’ demands. The vicious circle tightened as the banks’ inability to meet demands intensified those very demands.

The obvious solution was to reduce the supply of bank services, which meant reducing the number of banks. To some extent this was happening on its own; the thousands of banks that had failed since the stock crash represented perhaps a third of the preexisting number. Had Roosevelt not cared for the human consequences of the bank failures, he might have allowed the winnowing to continue until supply and demand in bank services achieved a new equilibrium.

But he did care, and Americans cared, which was why he had closed the banks and why he felt compelled to devise some method to reopen the stronger ones while shielding depositors from the consequences of the permanent closure of the weaker. And he had to do it all in a matter of days. The country could survive without banks in much the way a person can survive without water: for a few days and with rapidly increasing distress. Individual wallets and purses emptied; cash drawers and tills ran out; business slowed and then halted. Not even the First Family escaped the effects of the bank closing. Eleanor reported that without new cash she couldn’t keep the White House larder stocked.

Much of the work required to reopen the banks took place behind the closed doors of the Treasury and the White House. Will Woodin and Ray Moley met with the governors of the Federal Reserve, with private bankers, with members of Congress, with economists, and with just about anyone else thought to have a large stake or substantial influence in the operation of the nation’s banks. Through long days and longer nights they labored, determined to have a bank bill to present to Congress when the special session opened on March 9.

Yet to a surprising extent—to an extent unimaginable in any earlier administration—the discussions of bank reform took place in the plain view of the president’s press conferences. Other presidents had treated financial policy as highly confidential; Grover Cleveland’s elaborate effort to conceal his oral surgery had been occasioned by his desire to avoid alarming the financial markets. There was good reason for shrouding policy in secret: speculators were ready to leap on the slightest hint of a change in policy. Jay Gould, the most notorious of American speculators, had paid officials of the Grant administration hundreds of thousands of dollars merely to tip him off if any change in policy was imminent during his 1869 attempt to corner the gold market. White House and Treasury officials didn’t even have to say anything to set the markets tumbling; observers read institutional body language the way poker players read the faces of their opponents, and bet accordingly.

On this account, when Roosevelt commenced his first press conference, on March 8, with a candid discussion of administration thinking on the bank and money question, the reporters listened with astonishment. To be sure, Roosevelt didn’t let himself be quoted on the issue, but the information he supplied for background far exceeded anything Hoover or other presidents had provided. The first question put to Roosevelt referred to the bank policy he was expected to announce: “Will you go to Congress or send your message?”

“Send it,” Roosevelt replied.

“When will it be available here for us?”

“Judging by the fact that I haven’t started to write it, I should say at the last minute possible.”

The simple fact that the president hadn’t started writing such a momentous document, twenty-four hours before it was due, was news in itself. “Administration in Disarray!” the headlines might have read. Some of the reporters must have been tempted to race for the door, to file their alarming stories at once. But they waited to hear what else Roosevelt had to say. With money in such short supply, various participants and observers were suggesting the use of scrip—essentially IOUs of the kind banks employed among themselves and which were already circulating in places where the banks had been closed for more than a few days. Any advance notice of the administration’s thinking on the subject could be extremely valuable, for a decision to employ scrip would devalue the dollar, while a decision not to use it would have the opposite effect.

“Do you favor national scrip or scrip issued by clearing houses?” a clever correspondent asked, before Roosevelt had said anything about scrip at all.

Roosevelt didn’t bat an eye. “About Monday, the day before yesterday, a very, very wide use of scrip seemed necessary,” he said. “By last night it looked possible to avoid such general use of scrip. But that doesn’t mean that scrip will be eliminated by any means. Scrip may be used in many localities pending the working out of a sounder plan and more permanent plan to get additional currency into use.”

Reporters who reflected on Roosevelt’s answer realized he hadn’t given anything away. Scrip might be used; then again it might not be. But the fact that he was willing to discuss the subject freely was seductive. Hoover had treated reporters as adversaries; he met them in the same mood in which many people approach their dentists, and he often seemed as reluctant to open his mouth. Roosevelt, by contrast, brought the journalists into his confidence, making them almost co-conspirators in governing the nation. By accepting his ground rules, they limited what they could write about; for precisely this reason, some reporters deliberately stayed away. But for the great majority he was simply too good a story to pass up.

Roosevelt understood his advantage and played it for all it was worth. He knew he was brilliant in press conferences. His command of policy options was far greater than he had often been given credit for; those long conversations with Moley and the other professors, and with the various experts he had buttonholed over the years, hadn’t been for nothing. More important was his ability to break complicated questions down into pieces the ordinary reporter could understand and use. The White House press corps included a few experts on finance and on other specific subjects, but most of its members were generalists, not unlike Roosevelt himself. And in those days journalists rarely boasted advanced degrees, or even undergraduate degrees. They typically learned by watching and listening—again, not unlike Roosevelt.

Roosevelt’s self-confidence and personal presence in conducting his news conferences was by itself worth the price of admission. Even within the constraints he placed on what could be reported, each performance was a high-wire act. If he put something on the record that should have stayed off, the damage to his administration, and conceivably to the country, could be immense. If he stumbled, even in confidence, he could betray his ignorance to the reporters, losing their respect and damaging himself, perhaps no less severely.

He almost never stumbled. Twice a week, month after month, year after year, he opened the doors and put on his show. The great majority were in his office; others took place at Hyde Park, Warm Springs, or on the road when he was traveling. The performances were typically informative, frequently edifying, always entertaining. Theodore Joslin had worked in the Hoover White House before taking a job with the Washington Star; he contrasted his old boss with the new president. “Mr. Hoover always had a smile for the press,” Joslin said, giving Hoover some benefit of the doubt. “But he often was restrained. Mr. Roosevelt will wisecrack any day.” Yet jokes carried Roosevelt only so far. “The prime difference is in their attitude toward the depression. Mr. Hoover kept his problems to himself. Mr. Roosevelt talks with amazing freedom. There have been times when he has said little of consequence, but he has talked—and remember, that is the one thing the press wants the President to do.” As a result, Joslin observed, Roosevelt was “ace high with most of the corps.”

THE REPORTERS at the March 8 press conference inquired into Roosevelt’s position on gold. The banking question was inextricably linked to the money question, in that a surfeit of banks might be also interpreted as a dearth of money. Until his eleventh hour, Hoover had tried to get Roosevelt to commit to defending the American gold standard and thereby the full value of the dollar. Hoover understood what he was asking. “I realize that if these declarations be made by the President-elect,” Hoover confided to a fellow Republican, “he will have ratified the whole major program of the Republican Administration; that is, it means the abandonment of 90 percent of the so-called new deal.” But Hoover was convinced the New Deal needed to be abandoned, for he believed that Roosevelt’s promised agenda was what was destabilizing the financial markets. “Unless this is done, they run a grave danger of precipitating a complete financial debacle.” Hoover wrote this letter for the record, and to warn against the nefarious designs of the Democrats. “If it”—the debacle—“is precipitated, the responsibility lies squarely with them, for they have had ample warning—unless, of course, such a debacle is part of the ‘new deal.’”

Roosevelt hadn’t fought and won the election in order to ratify the very Republican policies he considered responsible for America’s distress. He ignored Hoover’s entreaties on gold, to the point of refusing to answer Hoover’s letters. Whether as a result of his refusal (Hoover’s interpretation) or Hoover’s policies (Roosevelt’s view), the strain on the dollar reached nearly the cataclysmic proportions the lame duck president predicted. During the week before the inauguration hundreds of millions of dollars flowed out of America’s banks and hundreds of millions in gold from the federal Treasury. The drain of dollars reflected a loss of confidence that the banks would be able to meet their obligations to repay depositors; the drain of gold a loss of confidence that the government would fulfill its promise to convert dollars to gold. The former was chiefly a domestic problem, as healthy banks were essential to the economies of every city and state; the latter had serious international ramifications, as much of the gold was being withdrawn by foreigners for export to their home countries.

Roosevelt’s refusal to join Hoover in declaring for gold naturally led to speculation—figurative and literal—that he would take the United States off the gold standard. At his first press conference he provided the reporters a primer on gold. He read from an article written by “my friend Robey”—journalist, economist, and sometime Brain Truster Ralph Robey—for the New York Evening Post. Robey, and now Roosevelt, explained that an effective gold standard had to meet four criteria. First, the dollar (or other unit of currency) must be defined as containing a certain amount of gold of a particular fineness. Second, the government must be committed to coining all the gold delivered to the mint. Third, the government must agree to convert paper dollars to gold upon demand. Fourth, gold must be allowed to move freely into and especially out of the country. By these measures, the United States had an effective gold standard. The gold content of the dollar was defined by law, translating into a gold price of $20.67 per ounce. Dollars were redeemable in gold, and gold could be exported at will.

But—and here the reporters sat up and paid close attention—other countries did not meet the four conditions. “For a good long time, as a matter of actual fact, the United States has been the only country on the gold standard,” Roosevelt said. Britain had formally gone off gold in 1931. “France has theoretically been on a gold standard, but nobody in France can go and take a bill to the bank and get gold for it, and as far as imports and exports go in France, it has been government controlled.” Switzerland and the Netherlands had similar systems.

Roosevelt seemed to be making a case for taking the United States off gold. No reporter put the question so bluntly—in part because of the way Roosevelt stage-managed his press conferences. As in private conversations, Roosevelt was a master at controlling the direction and flow of comments. The location of the conferences—in his office—was initially explained as a convenience, not least on account of Roosevelt’s impaired mobility. But it was equally a calculation, which proved out in practice, that reporters would feel themselves to be his guests and would conduct themselves as such. They rarely asked impertinent questions.

In this instance a reporter broached the subject indirectly. The president had spoken in his inaugural address of a “sound and adequate” currency. Did he care to elaborate?

Roosevelt laughingly corrected him. “I put it the other way around. I said ‘adequate but sound.’”

“Can you define what that is?”

“No.” This monosyllable revealingly elicited further laughter. Where Hoover would have tensed up, if he had answered the question at all, Roosevelt freely—almost merrily—acknowledged that a central part of his inaugural message consisted of indefinable fluff. “In other words—and I should call this ‘off the record’ information—you cannot define the thing too closely one way or the other.” He allowed himself to say that when the banks were closed, the country had lacked an adequate currency. “There wasn’t enough circulating to go around.” And he hoped that when the banks reopened, “a great deal of the currency that was withdrawn for one purpose or another will find its way back.”

But if it didn’t, the administration was prepared to supplement it. Scrip might be employed, or perhaps bank notes issued by the Federal Reserve. “In other words, what you are coming to now really is a managed currency, the adequateness of which will depend on the conditions of the moment. It may expand one week and it may contract another week.”

This was real news, for a managed currency was the opposite of one based on gold. The purpose of a gold standard was to prevent mere mortals—that is, politicians—from fiddling with the money supply to suit their short-term purposes. Roosevelt proposed precisely such fiddling.

“Can we use that part—‘managed’?” one reporter immediately queried, envisioning his lead and likely headline.

“No, I think not,” Roosevelt said.

Yet this was the biggest financial news in years, and so the reporters tried other tacks. “You haven’t defined what you think is ‘sound.’”

“I don’t want to define ‘sound’ now.” But Roosevelt did say—“entirely off the record”—that “in its essence we must not put the government any further in debt.”

“When you speak of a managed currency, do you speak of a temporary proposition or a permanent system?”

“It ought to be part of the permanent system—that is off the record. It ought to be part of a permanent system so we don’t run into this thing again.”

AND SO IT BECAME, though not for another month. The immediate challenge was to reopen the banks, which the administration and Congress contrived to do almost on schedule. Woodin, Moley, and several others were still drafting a bank bill as the members of Congress gathered on the morning of Thursday, March 9; the delay compelled Roosevelt to extend the bank holiday “until further proclamation by the President.” The extension bought enough time for Congress to receive the bill but not enough for the government’s printers to make copies for the members. Undeterred by their own ignorance, they approved it—in the form of a wadded-up newspaper, which served as a proxy for the bank bill itself—within hours. The law retroactively granted Roosevelt authority to close the banks and embargo gold, thereby removing any taint of unconstitutionality from Roosevelt’s executive action. Looking forward, the bank bill authorized him to reopen the banks when he saw fit, under the supervision of the comptroller of the currency, and to direct the Federal Reserve to issue notes that would circulate as money, regardless of the strictures of the gold standard, which remained technically in effect.

Roosevelt signed the bank measure that same Thursday evening. He shortly announced a timetable for reopening the banks. On Monday the twelve Federal Reserve branch banks would reopen, along with banks in each of those twelve cities. On Tuesday banks in cities where the bank clearinghouses had continued to operate—roughly 250 cities altogether—would reopen. On Wednesday the rest of the country’s banks would reopen. The whole schedule, however, was subject to the oversight of the Treasury, which would bar particularly precarious banks from reopening, lest they quickly fail and threaten the others.

THREE DAYS AFTER signing the bank bill, Roosevelt delivered his first radio address as president. The term “fireside chat” wasn’t yet in general use, but it would have been appropriate on this late-winter night. A week earlier Roosevelt had said the only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself; now he served up reassurance along with a basic lesson in economics. “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking,” he said. “I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be…. I know that when you understand what we in Washington have been about, I shall continue to have your cooperation as fully as I have had your sympathy and help during the past week.”

The first part of Roosevelt’s lesson explained why banks were so prone to failure from public loss of nerve. “When you deposit money in a bank, the bank does not put the money into a safe deposit vault. It invests the money in many different forms of credit—bonds, commercial paper, mortgages, and many other kinds of loans…. The bank puts your money to work to keep the wheels of industry and of agriculture turning around.” Only a small portion of the deposits remained on hand, to cover the ordinary needs of the public for cash. “The total amount of all the currency in the country is only a small fraction of the total deposits in all of the banks.” What had happened during the recent panic? “Because of undermined confidence on the part of the public, there was a general rush by a large portion of our population to turn bank deposits into currency or gold—a rush so great that the soundest banks could not get enough currency to meet the demand.” Once the rush started, it was a simple matter of arithmetic that the banks would run out of cash.

The bank holiday had been proclaimed to stem the rush. It had done its job. Roosevelt acknowledged the inconvenience the bank closings had caused. But the closings had been necessary to prevent further damage to the banking system. And they had worked. “No sound bank is a dollar worse off than it was when it closed its doors last Monday.” The bank holiday, moreover, had given Congress the time to pass legislation to relieve the stress on the banks. Officials of the Treasury Department were examining banks to see which could stand reopening, and the Federal Reserve was printing new currency to supplement the old. “The new currency is being sent out by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in large volume to every part of the country. It is sound currency because it is backed by actual, good assets”—namely the notes and bonds of the federal government.

The key to the success of the whole program was the cooperation of ordinary Americans. “There is an element in the readjustment of our financial system more important than currency, more important than gold, and that is the confidence of the people. Confidence and courage are the essentials of success in carrying out our plan.” Fear had been the enemy; fear remained all that could foil the new system. “Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system. It is up to you to support and make it work. It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.”

23.

LIKE MANY OTHER MEN WHO ASPIRE TO GREATNESS, FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT could be incredibly self-centered. Men seldom become great without believing the world revolves around them. If Sara Roosevelt hadn’t doted so on her only son, he would have lacked some of the self-confidence that enabled him to think he could overcome his polio and return to the political arena. Whether Sara appreciated this irony—that her very solicitude for her son, articulated over his first four decades of life, was much of what made him ignore her pleas to retire to Hyde Park squiredom for the remainder of his life—is unclear. She never became accustomed to the spectacle of politics, especially when it played out on her front lawn or in her dining room. Huey Long had arrived for lunch during the 1932 campaign and put on his characteristically egregious show. Franklin was compelled to suffer the Louisiana senator in silence, but Sara wasn’t. “Granny endured it as long as she could,” James Roosevelt remembered, “then, in a stage whisper that could have been heard down at the stables, inquired: ‘Who is that dreadful person?’” Sara naturally took pride in her son’s elevation to the highest office in the land and even issued a statement upon departing the capital after his inauguration: “I shall leave my son in Washington, confident that he will give all the strength that is in him, to help his country, and I shall be glad if every mother will pray God to help and preserve him.”

Yet the realities of public life often disconcerted and wounded her. She felt personally the political attacks on Franklin, and she sometimes found it difficult to reconcile his policies with the culture in which she had grown up and which still surrounded her in the Hudson Valley. She disapproved of Eleanor’s involvement in politics, which, notwithstanding the Nineteenth Amendment, Sara considered the province of men. After Franklin’s inauguration, Eleanor made a habit of visiting parts of the country most badly hit by the depression. One news report depicted her in a coal mine in the Appalachians; Sara wrote Franklin a few days afterward, her displeasure oozing from between the bland words: “I hope Eleanor is with you this morning…. I see she has emerged from the mine…. That is something to be thankful for.”

Eleanor valued Franklin’s new position more than Sara did. The role of First Lady of the nation didn’t differ enormously in kind from that of First Lady of New York, but the scale was much larger. Her first chore was to make a home of the White House, and she discovered that while a staff of eight or ten had sufficed to run the governor’s mansion in Albany, three to four times that many maids, butlers, ushers, cooks, gardeners, secretaries, security guards, and chauffeurs were required at the president’s house. The expenses were proportionally greater, and much came out of the president’s pocket. The federal government paid the wages of the staff, but the president, for reasons most apparent to the Congress that had imposed the practice in the early days of the republic, had to feed them. The president also had to pay for the Christmas parties and bonuses that were perquisites of their jobs. The government footed the bill for state dinners, but personal guests were the responsibility of the president. If Eleanor hadn’t heard it from Uncle Ted’s side of the family, she soon learned that the presidency drained most incumbents not simply psychologically and physically but financially as well. Eleanor’s separate financial accounts shielded her from the losses the presidency imposed on Franklin, but not from the worries they produced.

Had Aunt Edith been speaking to Eleanor, she could have told her about the myriad demands on a First Lady’s time. The receptions alone—for dignitaries from other countries, for members of Congress, for governors, for party officials, and for the well-heeled faithful—could wear the strongest woman down. Eleanor felt her feet screaming after only a few such receptions, until one of the members of the honor guard, who knew a bit about standing at attention for long periods, offered the hint to flex her knees ever so slightly now and then. No one would notice and the strain would be much less. Eleanor took the hint, and it worked. But it did nothing for the problem of having to shake hundreds of hands during the average reception, and thousands in the typical week. Here her genes came to the rescue. “I was lucky in having a supple hand, which never ached,” she wrote.

People wrote to the president about policy matters; they often wrote to the First Lady about personal issues. Amid the depression, Eleanor received countless letters relating the travails of their authors. Most were sincere, although some were ill conceived. One woman said she wanted a baby and hoped Mrs. Roosevelt could find her one. A follow-up letter arrived shortly saying that once she had the baby, she would need milk for it, and so could Mrs. Roosevelt get her a cow? And to keep the milk cold, she could use an icebox, if that wouldn’t be too much bother.

Some letters were patent scams. A young girl wrote that she had been chosen valedictorian of her high school class but didn’t have money to buy a dress and so would have to give her speech in her brother’s overalls. Could the First Lady help out? The envelope included a page from a mail-order catalogue showing the sorts of dresses that would be appropriate. Eleanor was normally a trusting type, but something about this letter evoked suspicion. She asked one of her staff to inquire about the girl and discovered that she wasn’t poor, wasn’t valedictorian, and in fact wasn’t even graduating. Another con artist intended to write Eleanor asking for money but at the same time wrote to an accomplice who was to act as a character reference if the White House investigated. The letter to the accomplice detailed the story that was being pitched to Eleanor—but, in an evident mix-up of envelopes, this letter went to Eleanor instead, revealing the whole plot.

Certain of Eleanor’s burdens she brought on herself. During the 1932 campaign the Associated Press had assigned Lorena Hickok to cover Eleanor. The two became friends and allies, with Eleanor providing Lorena insight into the campaign and Lorena providing perspective on life among the working classes. Hickok pointed out that the depression had been hard on journalists generally but on women journalists in particular. As in other fields, employers often assumed that men supported families and women didn’t and therefore that men were more in need of the jobs that remained available. Eleanor determined to do her part for females of the fourth estate by holding press conferences to which women reporters alone were invited. The discrimination appeared harmless or positive at first, when the topics tended to be of minor importance and focused on the social calendar at the White House. But as Eleanor broadened her activities and emerged as a voice for groups otherwise underrepresented within the administration, her comments elicited the interest of the major newspapers’ predominantly male political reporters. At the same time, one of the women reporters—Elizabeth May Craig—regularly argued that the solution to unfairness toward women was not unfairness toward men. Eleanor held the line. “I have great respect for her point of view,” she said of Craig, “but I never quite agreed on this question.” The men stayed out.

THE ROOSEVELT WHITE HOUSE, besides being home to Franklin and Eleanor, was the permanent address, though not the primary domicile, of their two youngest children, Franklin Jr. and John. Franklin Jr. was finishing at Groton and would start at Harvard in the fall; Johnny was two years behind him at Groton and similarly gone from their parents’ home most months. But they attended the inauguration and learned firsthand how their father’s new job would affect them. Johnny enjoyed the fast life, and on the night of the inauguration went out partying. He returned late and somewhat the worse for his pleasures. The guard at the White House gate didn’t know him, and Johnny carried no identification. The guard refused to wake the president or Mrs. Roosevelt for some kid who seemed to be playing a stupid prank, and he put Johnny off till morning, when his parents vouched for his identity. Not many days later Johnny got hungry in the evening. He went to the kitchen and tried to open the refrigerator, only to find it locked. “What kind of a joint is this?” he demanded of his mother. “You not only can’t get past the gates, you can’t even get into the icebox!”

Elliott Roosevelt remained in revolt against his parents. His first marriage—of an eventual five—was falling apart, and he blamed his father and mother and their lifestyle, and swore to have nothing to do with any of it. He kept his distance from the White House, visiting only when necessary.

Anna Roosevelt Dall’s marriage—her first of three—was likewise collapsing; her response was to seek out her parents rather than shun them. She moved into the White House with her two children, who became the daily delight of their grandmother and especially their grandfather. The president began his mornings with breakfast in bed and the morning papers; he refused to receive visitors, even Eleanor, until he was finished. The only exceptions were the grandchildren, who were allowed to bounce on his bed and romp about the room, regardless of the disruption they caused to the president’s concentration on matters of national or international importance.

James Roosevelt joined his mother and father and sister in the White House. James had married—for the first of four times—while Roosevelt was governor; his wife, Betsey Cushing, was one of three daughters of Harvey Cushing, America’s most famous neurosurgeon. The Cushing girls were celebrated for their beauty and the prominence of the men they married—a group that included, besides James Roosevelt, Vincent Astor (owner of the yacht that had carried Franklin to Florida before the inauguration), William Paley (founder and longtime chairman of CBS), and Jock Whitney (publisher of the New York Herald Tribune and eventual American ambassador to Britain). The wedding of James and Betsey recapitulated in certain respects the wedding of Franklin and Eleanor. Franklin stole the show from the bride and groom, who were left standing alone as the guests gathered around the popular New York governor and leading candidate for the presidency.

Franklin’s fondness for Betsey doubtless encouraged him to invite James to come live at the White House after the inauguration. James had provided indispensable assistance during the campaign, physically supporting Roosevelt at campaign stops, serving as subliminal proof of his virility, and providing a foil for his jokes. “This is my little boy, Jimmy,” Roosevelt would say, laughing, while looking up at his son, who was a couple inches taller than he was. Invariably Roosevelt would add, “I have more hair than he has!”—at which the gradually balding James would merely smile good-naturedly while the crowd applauded his father’s cleverness. Roosevelt wanted to keep James around, and so asked him to join the administration in an informal capacity. “It was an ambiguous sort of arrangement,” James recalled. “I had no official status, no salary.” James weighed the offer carefully. After a slow start on his career, he was finally making some money in the insurance business. He had Betsey and their small child to support. And he had debts from a chronically spendthrift lifestyle. “I was, as usual, pretty much behind the financial eight-ball,” he admitted. Roosevelt offered to pay him out of his own pocket, but James thought such an arrangement sounded too much like an allowance, and he turned it down. But he accepted the rest of his father’s offer. “I was intoxicated by the excitement of the campaign I had just been through with him, and I was keen to learn more about politics and government. I knew that stirring events were ahead, and nothing could have kept me from taking advantage of the ringside seat he offered me.” So the three moved into the White House as the permanent guests of Franklin and Eleanor.

THE WHITE HOUSE became the new home of Louis Howe as well. For the man who had labored for twenty years to make Roosevelt president, the election victory was bittersweet. “I guess I’ve worked myself out of a job,” he said half jokingly—but half seriously. Both Howe and Roosevelt knew that without Howe Roosevelt might never have reached the White House. But now that Roosevelt was in the White House, Howe’s role was unclear. For a time the press delighted in depicting him as the manipulator behind the throne. “Colonel Howe,” he was called, in reference to Wilson’s éminence grise, Edward House. Howe accepted the plaudits even as he understood that his hold on Roosevelt was weakening. The more powerful Roosevelt became, the more he attracted powerful people to him. Howe might get elbowed aside.

His uncertain health compounded his problems. The respiratory and heart troubles that had afflicted him for years got worse. His mind was as sharp as ever, and his wit as wicked. But he lacked the stamina for the major initiatives that obviously lay ahead. No one told him he was dying; no one had to. And no one knew whether death would come in six months or six years. But it was coming, and Roosevelt would have been foolish to lean too heavily on a reed that was about to break.

Roosevelt wasn’t foolish, yet neither was he hard-hearted. Besides, he knew that Howe, even in his diminished state, could provide him something that would be in decreasing supply in the months ahead—and would be the more valuable for its scarcity. Louis Howe was the last person who could call Roosevelt a fool to his face. The only other person who might have done so was Eleanor, but for all the reasons that made their marriage so complicated, she always felt she had to work by indirection. Howe regularly informed Roosevelt he was being pig-headed. He sent subordinates to Roosevelt’s office with instructions: “Tell the president to go to hell.” On one occasion Roosevelt exasperated Howe and then left to take a swim. “I hope to God you drown!” Howe shouted after him.

There was never any question that Howe would be part of the White House family. Eleanor set aside the Lincoln Bedroom for him, and he moved his meager belongings in. His wife, Grace, had relocated to Fall River, Massachusetts, and become something of a political force in the southern part of the Bay State. She and the children visited Washington occasionally—more frequently as Howe grew sicker—but their lives evolved separately from his.

As a representative of the president, Howe felt obliged to improve his manners and appearance. He still smoked his Sweet Caporals, and he still played the horses. But he brushed the ashes aside when reporters from the major dailies and magazines dropped by for an interview, and he had his suit pressed when a photo with the president was on the schedule. While he felt well enough to get out, he drove around Washington in a big Lincoln sedan equipped with a short-wave radio that filled up the rear seat and allowed him to eavesdrop on conversations momentous and trivial. The Secret Service worried, after the attempt on Roosevelt’s life, that persons close to the president might be in danger. Lacking the manpower to guard Howe and the persuasiveness to keep him from his rounds, the agency issued him a revolver for self-defense. The license that accompanied the weapon, identifying Howe as a “special operative,” gratified his sense of the absurd.

MISSY LEHAND completed the live-in portion of the White House family. She had been with Roosevelt for thirteen years and had abandoned all semblance of a normal life in order to serve him. She was too busy for suitors, too old for many of them, and uninterested anyway. She had followed Roosevelt to Florida, Warm Springs, and Albany, and there was no question that she would move to Washington with him, nor any that she would live in the White House—and be on duty around the clock. Her universe was bounded by her bedroom on the third floor, near the bedrooms of Anna’s children, and her office on the first, next to the president’s office. She handled Roosevelt’s most important correspondence, diverting lesser missives to Grace Tully and other assistants. She drafted many of Roosevelt’s replies, instructed merely by a nod of his head or a wave of his hand. She often lunched with Eleanor, leaving Franklin to Howe or official visitors. She frequently attended state dinners. “She is one of the best groomed women in Washington and attractive, with her soft gray hair bringing out the youthful contours of her face,” a capital columnist noted. She almost never spoke to the press, partly because she didn’t want to, partly because Roosevelt preferred that she not, and partly because she gave reporters nothing they could use. Her rare quoted comments reflected credit upward. “One never seems to be working hard with the Roosevelts because they work so much harder than anybody else,” she self-effacingly said.

AS FOR THE MAN who had brought them all there, he settled into the White House and quickly made himself at home. He knew he would be living there for four years; he hoped for eight. He didn’t imagine he would spend the rest of his life there. He shared the public parts of the building with the American people, and the residence with Eleanor, Anna, James, Louis, and the rest of the White House family. But two rooms on the second floor were his private sanctum, open to others only by invitation—with the exception of Louis, who allowed no door to come between him and Franklin.

Frances Perkins remembered the president’s bedroom. “A little too large to be cozy, it was not large enough to be impressive,” she wrote.

A heavy dark wardrobe stood against a wall. (There are no closets in the White House and wardrobes are necessary.) A marble mantelpiece of the Victorian type carved with grapes held a collection of miniature pigs—Mexican pigs, Irish pigs, pigs of all kinds, sizes, and colors. Snapshots of children, friends, and expeditions were propped up in back of the pigs. There was an old bureau between the windows, with a plain white towel on top and the 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 would 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. A folded old gray shawl lay at the foot. “Just the right weight,” the President once said. “Don’t like these great heavy things.” An old gray sweater, much the worse for wear, lay close at hand. He wore it over night clothes to keep his shoulders warm when he had a cold.

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 with telephone numbers, addresses, and memoranda to himself, 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. Hanging on the wall were a few pictures of the children and favorite familiar scenes. And over the door at the opposite end of the room hung a horse’s tail. When one asked what that was, he would say, “Why, that’s Gloucester’s tail.” Gloucester, a horse raised by the President’s father, had been regarded by the family as one of the finest examples of horseflesh in the world.

Next to the bedroom was Roosevelt’s study. John Adams, the building’s first resident, had used the oval-shaped room as a parlor; on New Year’s Day 1801 he and Abigail hosted a reception for their Washington neighbors and the citizens of the republic. Millard and Abigail Fillmore made the room into a library; Benjamin and Caroline Harrison installed the first White House Christmas tree there. Roosevelt converted the room into his private study. Its formality softened, and then disappeared, beneath the clutter of books, knickknacks, and personal treasures that followed him around. He had old friends join him there after hours, and also persons he hoped would become his new friends. Catholics were a vital Democratic constituency; Grace Tully recalled an afternoon with Cardinal Joseph Dougherty of Philadelphia. Roosevelt guessed that Tully, an Irish lass, would like to meet the cardinal, and he invited her to join them. “I’d love to, Mr. President,” she responded, “but I’ll follow in a few minutes. I must freshen up a bit.”

“You’re fine as you are, child,” Roosevelt said. “Remember, this doesn’t call for lipstick. He’s a cardinal.”

Tully ignored the president’s remark. “Why not a dab of lipstick,” she remembered asking herself. “Doesn’t a cardinal wear red?” By the time she reached the study, the president and the cardinal were engaged in lively conversation. Eleanor and Anna were there, along with Anna’s young son Johnny. Tully had heard that the cardinal was stout; in person he was more than stout. “Seated beside the president on a sofa, he was so relaxed that his chest seemed to reach his chin, and his stomach reminded me of a promontory much like the pictures of an outline map in our elementary geographies.” Eleanor had the kitchen send up refreshments, which the cardinal obviously enjoyed. “While he talked he drank deeply of his tea and worked steadily at a serving of dainty sandwiches,” Tully recalled. “Crumbs began to speckle the promontory of clerical cloth spreading across his ample front…. Despite my better intentions, I could not help but recall the legend of beloved St. Francis of Assisi dispensing bread to the birds.”

The others noticed, too. Anna was tense throughout the visit, and upon the cardinal’s departure she voiced her relief that he had gone.

“Why, Sis,” Roosevelt responded, surprised. “I thought the old cardinal was grand.”

“So did I,” Anna said. But she explained that she was almost sure Johnny was going to come up to her and say, “Mummy, that fat man is spilling tea and crumbs all over his tummy. Shall I tell him?”

GUESTS WHO CAME later in the day than Cardinal Dougherty were treated to Roosevelt’s famous cocktails. The Democratic landslide of 1932 encouraged Congress, even before Roosevelt’s inauguration, to propose the repeal of Prohibition; the proposal went to the states and became the Twenty-first Amendment. Roosevelt had never taken Prohibition personally, but the repeal allowed him to practice his bartending craft more openly than he had in Florida and at Warm Springs during the 1920s. He liked to make a show of mixing drinks, and the more imbibers the better. His specialties were old-fashioneds, for which he squeezed each drinker’s orange personally, and martinis, which Eleanor’s brother Hall, on occasional visits to the White House, claimed the president didn’t know the first thing about making. Hall, perhaps taking after his and Eleanor’s deceased father, liked his martinis much stronger than Roosevelt mixed them. He thought, moreover, that olives were effete, and he flavored his martinis with onions instead.

Roosevelt’s guests typically drank what he served them, but the regulars got what they wanted. Grace Tully drank rum during the summer and preferred her old-fashioneds made with scotch rather than bourbon. “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Roosevelt said when Tully requested the substitution. “It’s absolutely sacrilegious.” But he poured her the scotch. Harry Hopkins insisted on whiskey sours, which Roosevelt ordered from the kitchen. Henry Morgenthau didn’t like his liquor diluted at all. “What does a fellow have to do around her to get a real drink?” he complained. Roosevelt feigned exasperation. “Ring for Lucas and tell him what you want, Henry,” the president said. “We want you to be happy.”

Roosevelt wasn’t as good a bartender as he fancied himself, but his concoctions were generally drinkable. Not always, though. Princess Marthé of Norway visited Washington and brought the president a bottle of aquavit, the fiery staple her compatriots relied on to keep the Scandinavian winter at bay. Some while later Roosevelt asked Tully what she wanted to drink that evening. How about a martini? he suggested. She said that would be fine. Arthur Prettyman, the president’s valet, brought the ingredients and Roosevelt mixed them. “This will put hair on your chest,” he said, handing her the drink.

Tully took a sip. “Mr. President, that’s horrible!” she said. “It will take all the hair off your chest,” she said.

He tested the drink and whistled at its strength. He looked at the bottle and discovered that Prettyman had brought the aquavit rather than the gin. They laughed, and Tully told the story on her boss for years.

The cocktail hour was sacred as a respite from work. Roosevelt called it the “children’s hour” serious discussion ceased and the talk turned light and even frivolous. Guests who violated the custom were quickly made to appreciate their mistake. Yet Eleanor never caught on—or perhaps she simply refused to honor her husband’s preference. She would bring him correspondence she wanted him to read or would raise issues she thought he needed to consider. Sometimes he would put her off, and even when he acquiesced he did so in a way that indicated his annoyance that she was intruding on the scant time he had away from work. She found the experience fruitful enough to bear repeating, but it did nothing good for their personal relationship.

ROOSEVELT’S STUDY included a desk by the door to the bedroom. Here he occasionally read but more often worked on his stamp collection. He had acquired his first stamps as a boy, and he added to his inventory each time he and his parents traveled overseas. When friends or relatives wrote home from abroad, he saved the stamps. His circle of philatelic sources expanded gradually as he matured and exponentially after he became president. He inquired of the State Department what it did with the envelopes containing mail from foreign governments and was told that most were thrown away, although the stamp collectors on the department’s staff rescued the rare specimens. He indicated that he would like some of the good ones held for himself. Thereafter he received a weekly package from the State Department, delivered by courier each Saturday. He would spend much of that day and often part of the next examining the new items, investigating their origins, and inserting them in his albums. He supplemented these free additions with purchases made through agents and at auctions. His tastes grew more expensive over time, until he decided he’d have to specialize. He chose the Western Hemisphere and devoted himself to the stamps of Central and South America. But dignitaries from all over the world, once apprised that the president liked stamps, would bring him the best of their countries’ postal art, and he never turned the gifts down.

When he wasn’t working on his stamps, he often played solitaire. He preferred a two-deck variant with ten cards showing. He called it “Spider,” for reasons no one could remember. He played by himself, though he enjoyed company while he worked his way through the decks. Missy and Grace sometimes played double solitaire beside him; they would play and chat while he smoked and played silently.

ROOSEVELT’S WHITE HOUSE day typically began a bit past eight. Arthur Prettyman would bring breakfast and a stack of morning newspapers. Roosevelt scanned the front pages and read the editorials of the papers, which generally included the New York Timesand Herald Tribune, the Washington Post and Times-Herald, the Baltimore Sun, and the Chicago Tribune. Later in the day he would peruse clippings compiled for him by the White House staff and still later would examine the major evening papers readily available in the capital: the New York World-Telegram, Journal American, and Sun and the Washington Evening Star and Daily News. Most of the time he read the opinions of the editors with the practiced calm of the career politician. Occasionally, however, something struck him as unusually outrageous. “It’s a damn lie from start to finish,” he would bellow, tearing the offending piece from its page and handing it to Steve Early. The president’s press secretary would deal with the matter himself or remind Roosevelt to address the issue at his next press conference, if he hadn’t by then thought better of doing so.

Breakfast and the papers required about an hour. At nine thirty Early, Louis Howe, and one or more of the assistants who joined the administration—including, over time, Marvin McIntyre, Edwin “Pa” Watson, Jimmy Roosevelt, and William Hassett—would come in to discuss the day’s schedule and any difficulties it might entail. Sometimes a member of the cabinet with a particularly pressing problem would arrive and be shown in. Less frequently the president would receive members of Congress in his bedroom.

The official day began at ten thirty. Roosevelt, having dressed and shaved, would take the elevator to the first floor and be wheeled to the Oval Office. If it was a Friday he would meet with the press. The balance of the morning was typically filled with appointments. Visitors arrived on the quarter hour, but the schedule often fell afoul of Roosevelt’s inability to keep his visitors—or, more commonly, himself—from talking too long. Pa Watson or Grace Tully would stand at the door looking cross; Roosevelt would ignore the signal or take it as the excuse to send the visitor along.

Roosevelt’s morning lasted until one, when he ate lunch at his desk. If Henrietta Nesbitt, the head of the White House staff and the dictatress of the president’s diet, was in a good mood, he would get something he liked, perhaps calf’s liver and bacon, or creamed chicken, followed by chocolate pudding or pie. More often he made do with hash and a poached egg.

If it was a Wednesday, the afternoon would include a press conference. The alternation between morning conferences on Friday and afternoon sessions on Wednesday was designed to ensure that neither the morning papers nor the evening papers had a regular advantage in reporting breaking news from the White House. More meetings would ensue—the cabinet typically convened on Thursdays—followed by correspondence in the late afternoon. Quite often Roosevelt would simply sign letters Missy had drafted. When he opted to compose letters himself, Grace would generally take the dictation, as Missy didn’t like to. Grace recalled Roosevelt’s style:

When the President was deep in thought during dictation, he would frequently tap his fingers on the arm of his chair. But when his mind was made up on a phrase or a course of action his customary gesture was to stretch out his arms and place his hands flat on the top of his desk. “Now I’ve got it.” That was the gesture of finality. Often while dictating he would push his chair back a bit, grab hold of a trouser leg at the knee, swing the leg over his other knee, and fold his hands. Occasionally he would drop both arms and swing them by his chair while he dictated.

The afternoon’s work would end with a swim in the pool constructed in the White House basement with funds from supporters who wanted the president’s physical therapy to continue or with a rubdown by the masseur the navy assigned to the president. Roosevelt would meet with Ross McIntire, the White House physician, for symptomatic treatment of his chronic sinus condition.

The cocktail hour came next, followed by dinner. Formal dinners were held in the public rooms on the first floor of the White House; informal dinners took place in the family dining room on the first floor or in the study upstairs. After dinner Roosevelt might prepare a speech or tidy up some additional correspondence. Sometimes he worked on his stamps or watched a movie. His favorite actress was Myrna Loy. He kept his preference in film stars within the White House family, in part because Loy was said to have been the favorite actress as well of John Dillinger, the notorious bank robber who was shot to death in Chicago after leaving a Loy film. Roosevelt tried to get her to visit the White House, but on the one occasion when she did so, he was out of the country. “Well, what was she like?” he asked upon his return.

24.

AS AMERICANS TURNED OFF THEIR SETS FOLLOWING ROOSEVELT’S first radio address, they appreciated that their fate was in different hands than it had been in eight days before. The comparative few who could knowledgeably assess the mechanics of the new banking system understood how little it differed from the old one. The banks remained in private hands. They continued to rely on the confidence of depositors. The government supervision involved in the reorganization was modest in scope and temporary in duration. One observer who thought the president should have gone further remarked, “The president drove the money changers out of the Capitol on March 4th, and they were all back on the 9th.” Ray Moley, speaking from the inside, thought the result had taken longer but was hardly more earth-shaking. Wearily congratulating himself and Will Woodin—and of course Roosevelt—he asserted, “Capitalism was saved in eight days.”

On March 12 that remained to be seen. But what was coming into plain view was that capitalism was under new political management. From the shifting tones of the campaign, it had been impossible to tell whether Roosevelt would be the scourge of capitalism or its savior. The evidence of his first eight days suggested that he was more the latter than the former. Alongside the bank bill, Roosevelt sent to Congress a request for authority to slash the federal budget. Shaking his finger at the deficits accumulated and projected by the Hoover administration’s budgets—a total of $5 billion by the end of 1934—Roosevelt declared, “With the utmost seriousness I point out to the Congress the profound effect of this fact upon our national economy. It has contributed to the recent collapse of our banking structure. It has accentuated the stagnation of the economic life of our people. It has added to the ranks of the unemployed.” These evils would continue until drastic economies in government were effected.

Roosevelt’s call to cut federal spending was intimately connected to the emergency bank law. The new currency issue was to be based on government bonds, which like everything else in economic life would be less valuable—and in this case less inspiring of the confidence essential to the bank plan—the more of them there were. Roosevelt signaled his purpose in the name he gave to the spending measure: “A Bill to Maintain the Credit of the United States Government.”

But Roosevelt contended that economy in government spoke to a larger issue. “Too often in history, liberal governments have been wrecked on the rocks of loose fiscal policy. We must avoid this danger.” Putting the government’s house in order was the prerequisite to everything else. “National recovery depends upon it.” Before long the image of Roosevelt as budget slasher would appear quaintly ironic, even ludicrous. But at the outset of his administration he was deadly earnest, and perfectly plausible. Later generations would equate liberalism with largesse in government, but that was chiefly the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt. Members of Roosevelt’s own generation, the children of the Progressive era, were as likely to view government spending with concern as with favor. The progressives complained that government spent too lavishly on business and other private interests, whether directly through subsidies of such endeavors as railroad construction or indirectly via the tariff. Postwar liberals looked askance at the tariff and at the trade-promotion activities of Hoover’s Commerce Department, whose very headquarters—“that great marble building which is facetiously called in Washington the ‘Temple of Fact Finding,’ which cost the people considerably more than the Capitol of the United States,” Roosevelt said during the campaign—symbolized the government’s care and feeding of capitalism.

In any event, when Roosevelt asked for authority to cut the federal budget, people took him seriously. The primary complaint, in fact, of those who questioned the measure was that he would cut too deeply. Roosevelt contended that the fall in prices since 1929 justified a corresponding decrease in the salaries of government workers, and he requested the authority to cut federal pay by 15 percent—including his own pay, which would fall from ninety thousand dollars per year to seventy-five thousand. Not surprisingly, the thought of smaller salaries alarmed civil servants and political appointees and all of those who depended on them in every village, city, and state of the Union. No less dismayed were the armies of military veterans currently or prospectively on government pensions. Veterans were to American politics after the Civil War and again after the World War what the elderly would be to American politics in later decades (again courtesy of Roosevelt): a well-organized constituency with narrow, clearly articulated interests. After each of the big wars, and to a lesser extent after the Spanish-American War, the vets had persuaded Congress to expand the size of pensions and the ranks of the eligible. Presidents sometimes vetoed the measures—Grover Cleveland in the 1880s, Hoover in 1932—but the veterans always came back.

This was why Roosevelt wanted the power to cut the pensions unilaterally. The president’s budget bill was a power grab, but it was a power grab with a purpose and a justification. Roosevelt couldn’t expect Congress to stand up to the vets; it hadn’t stood up to them in the past. The individual members were too exposed politically. “If you don’t support this bill, your successor will,” lobbyists for the American Legion, the primary veterans’ group, told lawmakers whenever a pension measure came up; and experience proved them right. The president was better able to withstand the pressure, primarily because narrow, single issues rarely determine presidential contests. Roosevelt was willing to take the punishment for cutting pensions.

First, though, he had to get the authority he wanted. The American Legion issued a call to political arms against the president. “Wire your congressmen and senators immediately opposing Congress abdicating its constitutional responsibility by granting to the President authority to repeal or amend existing veterans’ laws without approval of Congress,” the Legion urged its members. Many thousands responded, prompting their representatives in Congress to denounce the budget bill as unconstitutional and unfair. Gardner Withrow, a Progressive from Wisconsin, reminded his colleagues in the House that spending was the prerogative of the legislature; if Congress gave the president the authority he wanted, the House and Senate might as well “shut the doors of the chambers and go home.” John Rankin, the Mississippi Democrat who headed the House committee on veterans’ affairs, complained that the government, through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, found money to coddle capitalists “who ought to be in the penitentiary today” the least it could do was look after the vets. “This is not the time, nor is it just, to make the veteran bear the bulk of this depression burden,” Rankin said. Wright Patman, the author of the 1932 bill to pay the bonus early, thought the president was hauling water for the rich. “The Morgans, Millses, and Mitchells are those who will benefit by such legislation,” the Texas Democrat declared.

But the dissenters were a minority. Most members were sufficiently traditional in their economic thinking to believe the budget ought to be balanced and sufficiently fearful of the vets and the postal clerks to be glad for Roosevelt to assume responsibility for cutting their pensions and pay. “It will be exercised in a spirit of justice to all, of sympathy to those who are in need, and of maintaining inviolate the basic welfare of the United States,” the president promised. Large majorities in both houses—266 to 138 in the House, 62 to 13 in the Senate—took him at his word.

ROOSEVELT’S BUDGET victory positioned him, for the moment at least, to the fiscal right of Hoover. Roosevelt would do what Hoover had been unwilling or unable to do. The capitalists could only applaud, if tentatively.

Yet Roosevelt’s style was nothing like that of the capitalist-friendly administrations that had gone before. The style of Coolidge and Hoover was institutional and stand-offish; the style of Roosevelt was intensely personal. Roosevelt didn’t ask Congress to cut the budget; he asked Congress to let him cut the budget. He spoke to the American people directly, asking them to trust him. He identified himself with the people when he said, in his Fireside Chat on the banking crisis, “It is your problem no less than it is mine.” And he proposed a partnership with the people when he promised, “Together we cannot fail.”

Americans responded to the Roosevelt style. As the banks reopened during the week after he spoke, millions of Americans took their money out from under those mattresses and returned it to their banks. Anxious others who had been prevented from withdrawing their deposits only by the bank holiday decided to leave their money where it was. As much as a billion dollars returned to the banks by the end of March, out of a circulation of around $7.5 billion. Gold, too, began flowing back into the banks and the Treasury—more than 600 million dollars in gold coin and gold certificates by month’s end—as holders rebalanced their portfolios between the security of gold and the convenience of other forms of money.

The praise for Roosevelt’s handling of the crisis was overwhelming. The Philadelphia Inquirer cheered Roosevelt’s “courageous” action. The Atlanta Constitution admired the president’s “bold and straight-from-the-shoulder” approach. The Cleveland Plain Dealer declared, “Mr. Roosevelt leads, as he was elected to lead. Congress responds. The country responds. The nation and the world applaud.” The Portland Oregonian saw the president’s plan as providing an “impetus toward permanent recovery.” The Wall Street Journal asserted, “Last week marked an end to three years of a nation’s drifting from bad to worse, an end to helpless acceptance of a malign fate…. For an explanation of the incredible change which has come over the face of things here in the United States in a single week we must look to the fact that the new Administration in Washington has superbly risen to the occasion.” William Randolph Hearst, who had opposed Roosevelt earlier and would oppose him again, for now joined the chorus. “I guess at your next election we will make it unanimous,” the press lord said.

Roosevelt might have taken time to savor the praise had the banks and the budget been the sum of the nation’s woes. But stanching the hemorrhage of money merely made the less acute symptoms more obvious. The new currency the Federal Reserve had printed and begun to distribute proved largely unnecessary; the bank recovery left most of it languishing in the vaults—where it did nothing to ease the downward pressure on prices that was the most painful aspect of the depression for such price-sensitive groups as farmers. For this reason, among those relatively few observers and pundits who withheld their praise following Roosevelt’s bank rescue, the principal complaint was that it left deflation unaddressed. “If this currency results in raising prices out of their present abnormally low stage,” the San Francisco Chronicle remarked, before events rendered the new notes superfluous, “that will be most welcome. A price increase is the prime factor to lift us out of depression.”

Deflation was an economywide problem, but because of their chronic indebtedness it hit farmers the hardest. Roosevelt had long commiserated with farmers, and even before the success of the bank rescue was assured, he turned to the farm question. There were two ways of dealing with low prices. One was to expand the money supply. This strategy was what the Populists and silver Democrats led by William Jennings Bryan had advocated in the 1890s with their call for remonetizing silver. They lost their fight in the election of 1896, and the country had officially embraced the gold standard—after decades of observing a de facto version—in 1900. Some silver-state Westerners still agitated for silver, but the first step in any systematic expansion of the money supply would be the abandonment of the gold standard.

The second way to raise prices for farm products was to curtail the supply. This approach posed problems of its own. There were millions of American farmers, and most prided themselves on their independence of mind; to get them to cooperate in reducing production would be exceedingly difficult. It would be all the more difficult on account of the fact that as much as cooperation might benefit the cooperators, it would benefit non-cooperators even more. The non-cooperators—the farmers who did not curtail production while others did—would profit from the higher prices without losing from reduced volume. Economics called such non-cooperators “free riders,” and they would ride a poorly designed program all the way to the bank.

The effects of the low farm prices were heart-rending. Hundreds of thousands of farmers couldn’t make their mortgage payments; scores of thousands lost their homes along with their sources of livelihood. Tens of thousands took to the roads, hoping for something better somewhere else. Farm tenants—renters—lacked security entirely. Lucky farmers who held on to their farms and lived in those regions that still practiced mixed agriculture could feed themselves from the garden plot and the orchard, but across vast swaths of the Midwest and California, where industrial monoculture had set in decades before, farm babies and children went hungry amid mountains of unsold wheat and unharvested corn.

Often the foreclosed farmers watched in helpless silence as their fields and homes fell under the auctioneer’s hammer, but sometimes they protested, on occasion violently. They and their friends would come armed to the auctions, intimidating potential purchasers. Others refused to be evicted, clutching the common-law principle that a man’s home is his castle and defying the bank’s agent, the tax man, or the new owner to storm it. When they gathered at crossroads stores and in Grange halls they spoke ominously of taking matters into their own hands. Those who recalled their history lessons cited Daniel Shays and the Whiskey Rebels of the eighteenth century.

Roosevelt heard of the helplessness and the militancy both. “Pathetic letters are coming in from the farm women,” Henry Wallace reported. “I suppose that the most terrible cases of heart sickness and fear in the United States today are those of a tenant farm family where the rent cannot be paid, where eviction is imminent, and where there is not enough machinery and equipment to make it possible for the family to go on another farm. The situation of these people is even more desperate than that of the unemployed in the cities.” John Simpson, the president of the Farmers’ Union, wrote Roosevelt not long before the inauguration to explain that the countryside was about to explode. “My candid opinion,” Simpson told the president-elect, “is that unless you call a special session of Congress, after the fourth of March, and start a revolution in government affairs, there will be one started in the country. It is just a question whether or not you get one started first.”

Whether what Roosevelt had in mind for the farm economy was a revolution or not was a matter of semantics. But the centerpiece of his farm program was a dramatic departure from the unbridled competition among farmers that had fostered the uncontrollable overproduction that currently impoverished them all. Roosevelt intended to impose planning on the farm sector. The essential problem was too many fields and too many farmers; the solution was to reduce the number of both. Taking marginal fields out of production would be the first step; taking marginal farmers out of the business would follow.

But neither step would come easily. As chaotic as the farm sector was economically, it was almost as anarchic politically. Not all wheat farmers thought alike, and they certainly didn’t think like cotton farmers or hog raisers or dairymen or apple growers. Farm owners often opposed what benefited farm tenants; farm processors found themselves at odds with farm producers. Each group had its spokesmen, some more persuasive and better connected than others.

Had Roosevelt known agriculture well, he might have imposed a design of his own on farm reform. But though he had long considered himself a friend of the farmer, and even postured as a farmer himself on political occasions, he recognized the limits of his expertise. Besides, for him to take a strong position would prematurely alienate those groups that didn’t get what they wanted. Alienation for some would happen inevitably, but the longer it could be delayed, the better the chance of passing a farm bill. Clifford Gregory, the editor of the Chicago-based Prairie Farmer, the oldest and arguably most important organ of the farmers, recalled a meeting with then-candidate Roosevelt, who explained the approach he would take. “I am going to call farmers’ leaders together,” Roosevelt said, “lock them in a room, and tell them not to come out until they have agreed on a plan.”

Roosevelt tapped Henry Morgenthau and Rex Tugwell as his liaisons with the farm leaders, who gathered in Washington several weeks after the election. Tugwell described the first steps toward building a consensus: “Things were complicated by each of the farm leaders having a program of his own. This was true also of many agricultural representatives in Congress…. They had to make speeches defending their own position, to read their own proposals (many of which were already in bill form, already introduced), but Morgenthau and I sat tight and listened. The general result after two days of this was that they agreed unanimously (though some of them merely came in for political reasons and could hardly be counted on).”

What they agreed on was what became the Agricultural Adjustment Act, albeit with considerably more difficulty than Tugwell anticipated. By the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration, planting season had begun in the South, and any measure that aimed to curtail production was almost too late already. Roosevelt reconvened the farm leaders for a one-day session on March 10; they confirmed the essence of their earlier agreement and recommended measures that became the basis for the bill he sent to Congress a few days later. Its essence was “domestic allotment,” a scheme for reducing the farm surpluses by paying farmers not to produce oversupplied commodities. To those outside the farm sector the concept seemed bizarrely counterintuitive, but to farmers themselves it made sense. They were to cut production, thereby reducing the crops they would have for sale. Perhaps market prices would rise to offset the reduced volume, but perhaps not. They ought to be paid for taking the risk. The logical alternative to paying farmers not to produce was to compel them not to produce. Besides being unconstitutional this was politically impossible. Roosevelt’s farm bill would create an agriculture administration, which would do the same kind of culling of agriculture that Roosevelt’s bank examiners were doing for banking. The farm administration would determine how much of each commodity America’s farmers should produce, and it would establish payment schedules to meet those targets.

Domestic allotment was controversial even among farmers, and in order to get the farm leaders on board it was balanced by other initiatives. For decades farmers had wanted the federal government to purchase surplus crops and market them overseas; such a provision was written into the Roosevelt bill. Farmers pleaded for debt relief, arguing that interest rates that had been reasonable before the depression were killing them now; the Roosevelt program promised help on debt, albeit vaguely.

CURTAILING PRODUCTION would tend to raise farm prices, but not as fast or surely as increasing the money supply. Diehard populists like Oklahoma Democrat Elmer Thomas contended that every other effort would be wasted unless the president did something about money. Roosevelt’s farm bill passed the House in mere days and by an overwhelming margin—315 to 98. But Thomas stalled its progress in the Senate by proposing an amendment authorizing the president to expand the money supply by remonetizing silver, redefining the relationship between the dollar and gold, or reissuing the kind of fiat currency—“greenbacks”—that had circulated during and after the Civil War.

Roosevelt had known that the money question would come up, but he had hoped to keep it separate from the farm issue. The Thomas amendment made this impossible—as Thomas knew it would. The Oklahoma senator felt an obligation not merely to farmers but to the people of America generally. “No permanent relief is possible until the masses have buying power,” he declared. The way to give them buying power was to put money in their hands.

On this point opinions differed—as vigorously as they had since Bryan and McKinley slugged it out over silver in the 1890s. Hoover had lost the election but still garnered 40 percent of the popular vote. Not everyone who voted for him backed the gold standard with his devotion, but neither did everyone who voted for Roosevelt want him to sever the dollar’s tie to gold. (The million Americans who together voted for Socialist Norman Thomas or Communist William Foster presumably had less reverence for gold than Republicans or many Democrats, but one could never be sure.)

Elmer Thomas’s maneuver compelled Roosevelt to take a position on money sooner than he had intended. Roosevelt accepted the Thomas amendment, noting, however, that it only authorized the president to devalue the dollar. It did not require him to do so. “Purely discretionary” was how Roosevelt, speaking at a press conference, characterized his prospective power to expand the money supply. The Thomas amendment provided various methods of achieving inflation. “I do not have to use any of them,” Roosevelt said.

He wasn’t opposed in principle to inflation. On April 5, before the Thomas amendment came to a vote in the Senate, Roosevelt employed his new authority under the banking act to order private possessors of gold to surrender their yellow metal for currency. “The chief purpose of the order,” he explained, “is to restore to the country’s reserves gold held for hoarding and the withholding of which under existing conditions does not promote the public interest.” Roosevelt failed to specify, in the moment, just how his gold seizure would serve the public interest; several years later he was more forthcoming. “This order served to prevent the accumulation of private gold hoards in the United States,” he said. “It served as a means for further strengthening our banking structure and preventing the possibility of a recurring threat.” So far so good, and so innocuous. What followed was more controversial and was what the president kept quiet at the time. “It was the first step also to that complete control of all monetary gold in the United States, which was essential in order to give the government that element of freedom of action which was necessary as the very basis of its monetary goal and objective.”

The administration’s “monetary goal and objective” proved to be a managed currency, one freed of the constraints of gold. The gold order of April 5 was the first step; Roosevelt’s acceptance of the Thomas amendment two weeks later was a second. “Congratulate me. We are off the gold standard,” he told his economic advisers. Some of them sighed with relief; others spluttered with indignation. Lewis Douglas, the president’s budget director, was among the latter. “This is the end of western civilization,” he prophesied, only partly in black jest. Will Woodin lamented, “What’s a secretary of the Treasury to do when he’s presented with a fait accompli?” Roosevelt explained that his acceptance of the Thomas amendment was tactical. “He said that the reason for the amendment was that unless something of this sort was done immediately, Congress would take the matter in its own hands and legislate mandatory law instead of permissive,” James Warburg, an adviser to Woodin, recalled.

Roosevelt may have overstated the hazard of a congressional diktat, but the result of the Thomas amendment, which passed the Senate in slightly revised form, and the House shortly thereafter, was to augment the president’s power over the money supply. As an indication of what he would do with the added power, he issued an executive order on April 20 forbidding the export of gold without license from the Treasury. More permanently than anything till now, Roosevelt’s embargo cut the dollar adrift from gold. The president subsequently defended this action as “designed for the purpose of gaining for the American dollar freedom—freedom at home from the threat of instability, and freedom abroad for the beginning of a new realignment to the other currencies of the world.” But this was a rhetorical cloak, and a thin one at that. The freedom that interested Roosevelt was his own freedom to revalue the dollar in keeping with his broader designs for the political economy as a whole.

The Thomas amendment broke the impasse on the farm bill, to the discomfiture of conservative Republicans. Joseph Martin of Massachusetts thought the bill gave entirely too much power to the administration. “When you send out this army of tax gatherers to tell the farmer what he can plant and what he can sell, you are well on the road to Moscow,” Martin declared. Michael Hart of Michigan cited a comment by Rex Tugwell, years earlier, that Russia’s experiments in agriculture held lessons for America. Hart rejected the professor’s latest brainstorm, the farm bill, saying, “I am not going to follow communism.” James Beck of Pennsylvania thought a different country provided an apter analogy. “The only argument in favor of this bill is that it is an emergency proposition,” the Republican representative said. “That is a most damnable thing, and in Germany, with the same excuse, they are voting power today to Hitler.”

Yet the dissenters were a small minority. The farm bill passed the Senate on a vote of 64 to 20. The measure the president signed on May 12, after reconciliation of the House and Senate versions, created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which supervised the domestic allotment program. The fight in the Senate over the money question had pushed the initial implementation of the program well into the growing season and produced precisely what Roosevelt had hoped to avoid: the deliberate destruction of crops and livestock in the name of the new federal program. Roosevelt recognized that paying farmers to do nothing would be controversial enough, but paying them to plow up cotton and kill pigs and pregnant cows, while hunger still threatened the land, could be a public relations disaster. As things happened, the administration weathered the storm, chiefly because farmers were desperate for anything that would relieve their plight. But the AAA never entirely got out from under the cloud that shadowed its birth, and when critics of the New Deal adduced evidence against Roosevelt’s programs, they often started with those dead pigs.

25.

ROOSEVELT’S REMARK, DURING THE SUMMER OF 1932, THAT HOOVER’S harsh treatment of the Bonus Army had sealed the president’s defeat in the election left something obvious unsaid: that the veterans would be back, to confront Hoover’s successor. And so they were, in the spring of 1933. Most had been chastened by their defeat the previous summer; many showed the added strain of another several months of unemployment and hardship. Yet all were hopeful that a new and presumably more compassionate administration would give them a more sympathetic hearing.

The reception Roosevelt gave them differed completely from Hoover’s. The president treated them not as potential revolutionaries but as honored guests. He ordered a camp prepared for them across the Potomac in Virginia and issued a special executive order to cover the cost of tents, latrines, showers, and mess halls serving three square meals a day. While he declined to meet with them personally—“You know,” he said in answer to a press conference question whether he would visit the camp, “I have been working really day and night; I don’t believe I can get off”—he did the next best thing. Eleanor Roosevelt had followed the vets’ story for months; one afternoon Louis Howe asked her to take him for a drive. He needed to get out of the White House, he said, and a tour through the countryside would do him good. As it happened—as Howe and Roosevelt had arranged—the tour took them to the vets’ camp. “I was rather surprised,” Eleanor recalled afterward. She was even more surprised when Howe announced that he was going to stay in the car. She must go talk to the vets by herself.

It was a brilliant touch. Ten months earlier Douglas MacArthur had led an armored column against the vets; on this afternoon Eleanor Roosevelt entered the camp alone. “Very hesitatingly, I got out and walked over to where I saw a line-up of men waiting for food,” she remembered. “They looked me over curiously, and one of them asked my name and what I wanted. When I said I just wanted to see how they were getting on, they asked me to join them.” Word that the First Lady was in camp spread rapidly, and the vets all gathered around. They gave her a tour of the camp, showing it off despite the day’s rain and the season’s mud. She shared their midday meal in the mess hall and spoke about how she had visited the front in 1919 and witnessed what they and their comrades had been through. “I never want to see another war,” she said. “I would like to see fair consideration for everyone, and I shall always be grateful to those who served their country.” She led the old soldiers—many of whom in fact were little older than her sons—in songs, including “There’s a Long, Long Trail.” She utterly disarmed them emotionally. “Good luck!” they shouted as she walked back to the car. “Good-bye and good luck to you!” she answered. One vet remarked afterward, still amazed: “Hoover sent the army; Roosevelt sent his wife.”

ROOSEVELT ALSO SENT jobs. Eleanor’s visit, besides foreshadowing the peculiar effectiveness the Roosevelt team of Franklin and Eleanor would develop, bought the president time to deal with the vets, by means of the New Deal reform that was closest to his heart. On March 14 Ray Moley relayed a query from Frances Perkins regarding a relief issue that had come before the new labor secretary. The president didn’t answer the question at once. “Instead, he began to describe an idea to which, he said, he had given a lot of thought and which he’d formulated to his satisfaction only the night before,” Moley remembered. “It was the stunning idea of putting an army of young men, recruited from the unemployed, to work in the forests and national parks.” Roosevelt directed Moley to outline a program.

Stunning though the idea might have been to Moley, it was hardly original. Various states, including Roosevelt’s New York, had put young men to work since the onset of the depression, as had certain foreign countries, including Germany and Italy. The Italian model of human organization was already unsavory and the German version would grow odious before long, but they and the state plans demonstrated what governments could do to mobilize the unemployed toward socially constructive ends. Roosevelt had promised something along these lines during the campaign and been ridiculed by the Republicans for utopian excess. But now that he was president, he moved to implement the concept. He summoned members of his cabinet to meet with congressional leaders; together they conceived a program that would enroll unemployed young men and send them off to the woods.

He shared his thinking with the press. “The idea is to put people to work in the national forests and on other government and state properties on work which would not otherwise be done—in other words, work that does not conflict with existing so-called public works,” he said. A reporter asked how many people he had in mind. “On the national forests, the Forestry Bureau says two hundred thousand men,” Roosevelt answered. The plan would be much more than make-work, although it would certainly provide employment. In the East, where the unemployment was greatest, nearly all the government timber land was second or third growth. The trees—saplings, in many cases—were small and overcrowded. Roosevelt’s army of foresters would thin the stands, yielding cordwood today and lumber in the future. They would also build firebreaks, to keep forest fires from spreading.

Roosevelt mentioned the figure of a dollar a day as the wage the two hundred thousand conservation corpsmen would make. One reporter did some quick estimates. “I can see it will run into many millions of dollars,” he said. “You would need half a billion or one billion on this one item.” Where did the president propose to find the money?

Roosevelt dodged the question, declining to go into the details of a program that didn’t yet exist. But speaking on background, he said, “These people would be people who are today on the dole. They are performing no useful work. Those are the only people we would take—people who are performing absolutely no work at all and just being barely supported by communities and states.”

One of the reporters pointed out that most of the national forests were in the West. “That would involve a movement from the centers of population for the men to be put to work in those forests. Is that contemplated?”

In fact it was. Roosevelt had long believed that the American population was poorly distributed, with too many people in the East and too few in the West. He hoped the conservation corps would encourage some of those Easterners to relocate to the West. But such ambitious social engineering was more than he wished to share at the moment. “Haven’t got to that yet,” he said. “Can’t tell you.”

On March 21 Roosevelt submitted a bill to Congress. He emphasized that the conservation corps would not interfere with the normal labor markets and would confine itself to work on the public domain. The War and Labor departments would handle the logistics of identifying and enrolling 250,000 young men, training them, and transporting them to their work sites; the Interior and Agriculture departments would direct the actual work. The program would require no new funds at once; unspent public works monies would suffice for several months at least. The corps would benefit the public in several ways, Roosevelt said. It would conserve America’s natural resources. It would improve the nation’s public lands. Not least, it would strengthen the country’s moral resources. “The overwhelming majority of unemployed Americans, who are now walking the streets and receiving private or public relief, would infinitely prefer to work,” the president asserted. “We can take a vast army of these unemployed out into healthful surroundings. We can eliminate, to some extent at least, the threat that enforced idleness brings to spiritual and moral stability.”

Not everyone bought into Roosevelt’s vision. Most Republicans disliked anything that gave the Democratic president more power, and though none went so far as to predict that the corpsmen would become Roosevelt’s equivalent of Mussolini’s Black Shirts, they distrusted and resented the creation of a large class of impressionable young people dependent on the administration for a living. The Mussolini comparison, ironically, was left to the Democrats, including William Green, the president of the American Federation of Labor, who said the president’s program smacked “of fascism, of Hitlerism, and in some respects of sovietism.” Green told a joint session of the House and Senate labor committees that he objected to the dollar-a-day wage as undermining everything that organized labor had been struggling for. On a more philosophical level, he distrusted the military overtones of the president’s scheme. “Labor is deeply apprehensive of this plan,” Green said. “It dislikes the regimentation of these men in the army. Labor is always jealous of its rights to voluntary action.”

Roosevelt didn’t wish to get into a fight with Green, as organized labor was a critical Democratic constituency. But neither did he intend to let such a statement go unanswered. A reporter asked if the president cared to comment on the negative reaction from labor. “No, because I might seem to be answering Bill Green,” Roosevelt said. “I will tell you, if you will write it in such a way that it does not appear as an answer to Bill Green. You might take it just for background.” The reporters lowered their pens and listened. “In the first place, they all talk about military control and militarization, but that is just utter rubbish,” Roosevelt said. “The camps will be run just like those in any other big project—Boulder Dam or anything like that. Obviously you have to have some form of policing. In other words, you cannot allow a man in a dormitory to get up in the middle of the night and blow a bugle.” This drew the desired laugh. “You have got to have order, just perfectly normal order that you would have in any kind of big job. That is so much for the military end.”

As to the conservation corps disrupting the labor market, Roosevelt said, nothing could be more ridiculous. “This is not competition, because these fellows have no chance to get a job at the present time, and 250,000 men, as Arthur Brisbane”—a Hearst columnist—“pointed out this morning in his column, is a mere drop in the bucket. It is just a little step toward the relieving of 12 million people, but it is a practical step.” Regarding the wage rate: “To be sure, they are to be paid only a dollar a day, but it costs the government another dollar a day to take care of them…. A two-dollar-a-day wage for that type of work would probably be higher in a great many places than what labor is actually paid.” That really would disrupt the labor market. Roosevelt cited his own experience as an employer of unskilled workers in Georgia. “In 1929 their pay was about $1.50 or $1.75 a day with no quarters, no food, no clothing.” And wages had fallen considerably since 1929.

The Senate approved Roosevelt’s conservation corps bill on a voice vote after cursory debate. The House spent longer with it, largely because of labor’s opposition. Representatives proposed various amendments; one that stuck was sponsored by Oscar De Priest of Illinois, who in 1928 had become the first African American elected to the House in three decades. De Priest specified that the conservation corps must not discriminate on account of race, color, or creed. Almost no one else would have sponsored such an amendment, but De Priest having done so, few wished to go on record as opposing it. The amended bill passed the House and was reconciled with the Senate’s version, and on March 31 Roosevelt signed the law creating the Civilian Conservation Corps.

THE ROOTS OF the Securities Act of 1933 lay in the same progressive soil that motivated much else about the New Deal. Samuel Untermyer had come to national prominence as the antagonist of J. P. Morgan in the 1912 Pujo Committee hearings into the money trust. Untermyer, as counsel to the committee, probed, prodded, and embarrassed the great financier, who refused to admit not simply wrongdoing but almost any doing at all, on grounds that his private business was none of Untermyer’s or the public’s business. Morgan left the hearings in a huff, sailed for Europe on his annual art-buying vacation, and dropped dead in Italy. While the art sellers mourned, Morgan’s friends blamed Untermyer for overtaxing Morgan’s delicate constitution. Whatever the link, Morgan’s passing cleared the way for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which transferred effective control of the money supply from the big bankers to the federal government.

The Republican administrations of the 1920s had predictably little use for Untermyer, but the return of the Democrats found him, at seventy-five, as eager as ever to bring the barons of Wall Street to account. Roosevelt knew Untermyer, but it was Ray Moley who enlisted his services shortly after the election. Precisely what Roosevelt wanted Moley and Untermyer to do was as uncertain as much else about the early New Deal. Unlike banking and farming, the securities business was hardly in crisis in 1933. In the doldrums, yes, but Wall Street’s crisis had occurred in the six months starting in October 1929. Consequently there was no pressing need for emergency legislation. All the same, Roosevelt and the Democrats had railed against the speculators and profiteers of the stock exchange for so long that they felt compelled to do something to rein them in, even if they weren’t currently threatening to break away.

So popular was the idea of restraining Wall Street that multiple groups set to work on the project. At least two of the groups worked for Roosevelt. Besides Moley and Untermyer, Roosevelt commissioned Commerce Secretary Daniel Roper and Attorney General Homer Cummings to get up some legislation, with the assistance of Huston Thompson, another old Wilsonian. The two administration groups worked in parallel and in ignorance of each other till an embarrassing moment of recognition in March. Moley thought Roosevelt had simply forgotten about him and Untermyer when he put Roper and Thompson on the case; more likely Roosevelt let Moley draw that conclusion lest he be offended. In fact Roosevelt wanted to see who had the better ideas.

The ideas differed sharply. Untermyer, whose legal career reached well back into the nineteenth century, recalled when Republican justices had invalidated the most innocuous efforts to restrain business. Eyeing the current makeup of the Supreme Court, he feared that efforts to regulate the securities industry might be similarly tossed out. For this reason he aimed to put the regulators in the Post Office, which had an irrefutable federal mandate. He argued that securities were marketed and delivered via the mails and on this account could be regulated. Roper and Thompson thought the Post Office scheme silly. What did the postmaster general know about Wall Street besides the addresses of the big firms doing business there? Thompson had run the Federal Trade Commission and was perfectly comfortable with the exercise of federal power. But Thompson, and Roper too, knew much less about the securities business and securities law than Untermyer, and their information deficiency became apparent in the imprecision of their arguments.

Roosevelt brought the disputants together and told them to work out their differences. Moley found the experience painful. “The peace conference in the President’s study was a frost,” Moley remembered. “Old Untermyer felt, and showed, a cold contempt for Thompson’s work. Thompson, in self-defense perhaps, kept shooting at the Achilles heel of Untermyer’s—the Post Office idea. Untermyer then got on his high horse. Not only was the Thompson bill a mess, but his own was perfect. And that, he wished it understood, included the Post Office idea.” Moley despaired, concluding that reconciliation was hopeless. But Roosevelt laughed off his pessimism. He had Thompson incorporate some of Untermyer’s suggestions into a revised bill he could send to Congress at once, and he kept aside the rest of Untermyer’s plan for subsequent use.

The heart of the bill Roosevelt sent up was a novel concept in the American securities industry. “The big objective is to restore the old idea that a person who uses other people’s money does so in a fiduciary capacity,” Roosevelt explained in a press conference on March 29. “A person who works in either a stock or a commodity exchange is acting as the agent for other people.” This being so, the agent had a responsibility to be as honest and forthcoming as possible. Roosevelt proposed a new standard for the securities trade, what he called “caveat vendor.” The common-law principle of caveat emptor allowed sellers to get off too easily. “Let the seller beware as well as the buyer,” the president said. “There is a definite, positive burden on the seller for the first time to tell the truth.” Roosevelt insisted that he wasn’t requiring omniscience, nor was he banning speculation. He gave an example: “If a company is organized to develop a gold mine, and it has got what it and the engineers honestly believe to be a perfectly good speculation, and it is not over-capitalized, there is no reason why it should not get a license to operate, provided that the public is informed that it is, like most gold-mining operations, a speculative venture.” The point was to level the field between those issuing the securities and those buying them.

Roosevelt’s proposal sparked an immediate reaction from the financial industry. Most brokers and investment bankers didn’t want to be regulated at all and loudly said so. Even those who accepted that some regulation was inevitable predicted that the president’s concept of caveat vendor would provoke endless litigation. One could easily imagine disappointed investors suing corporate directors or the underwriting banks if a stock issue failed to meet the investors’ hopes. With the burden of proof now on the sellers, juries would likely side with the investors.

Further complicating the passage of Roosevelt’s bill were competing ideas percolating through Congress. The members of the pertinent committees in the Senate and House were barraged with opinions, advice, promises, and threats from lobbyists and principals of the securities industry. Moreover, after all the new authority Congress had given the president thus far, many senior members of the legislature felt they had to draw the line somewhere. Moley, who tried to push the administration’s bill forward, described the experience as “a tortuous dance on the eggs of congressional prerogative.”

The dancing took two months, and it ended only when Roosevelt and the congressional leaders decided to leave a large part of securities reform until later. But enough of Roosevelt’s original design informed the Securities Act of 1933 that the president was able to say, on signing: “This measure at last translates some elementary standards of right and wrong into law.” The new act required the registration of securities issues with the Federal Trade Commission—a responsibility later shifted to the Securities Exchange Commission—and the filing of basic information about the issuing corporation. Roosevelt acknowledged that the act alone wouldn’t guarantee a revival of the stock market, let alone the larger economy. But a continued absence of the standards the act established would preclude a revival. “Without such an ethical foundation, economic well-being cannot be achieved.”

THE CREATION OF the Tennessee Valley Authority was, in its own way, just as opportunistic as the passage of the Securities Act, and it took its inspiration from a progressive as old and battle-hardened as Samuel Untermyer. Republican George Norris of Nebraska had applauded Theodore Roosevelt’s smiting of the trusts and especially his conservation of natural resources, but he refused to follow TR out of the party in 1912. He liked Woodrow Wilson domestically but resisted American intervention in the World War and couldn’t abide the League of Nations. As a Republican, Norris benefited from the GOP hegemony of the 1920s, but as a progressive he chafed at the direction the leadership was taking the party. He backed Al Smith in 1928 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Meanwhile he campaigned quixotically for the abolition of the electoral college and more successfully for the conversion of Nebraska’s bicameral legislature to a single-house model (a transformation that would come to pass in 1934).

Norris might never have adopted the Tennessee Valley as a cause had Henry Ford not tried to build an empire there in the 1920s. Amid the same rush to privatize wartime plants and facilities that yielded the Teapot Dome scandal, the Harding administration advertised to sell a federal munitions factory and hydropower plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The raw material for the explosives was nitrates, which might as readily be made into fertilizer; the power plant could be used to encourage additional industrial development. Ford offered to take control of the Muscle Shoals facility on a lease lasting till the end of the twentieth century.

Norris distrusted Ford and disliked the idea of handing over to private enterprise what had been built at public expense. As chairman of the Senate agriculture committee he launched an investigation that concluded, in Norris’s sarcastic words, that Ford’s bid for Muscle Shoals would be “the most wonderful real estate speculation since Adam and Eve lost title to the Garden of Eden.” He visited Muscle Shoals and, like Roosevelt in rural Georgia, came to know and respect the poor folks of the Tennessee Valley. He envisioned what the Tennessee Valley could become under the sympathetic guidance of a progressive presidential administration.

When that administration arrived, Norris didn’t have to be asked twice to put together a program. His vision for what would be called the Tennessee Valley Authority encompassed flood prevention, erosion control, irrigation, reforestation, hydroelectric generation, the retirement of marginal agricultural lands, the encouragement of industry, and the diversification of employment. Nothing so ambitious had ever been undertaken by the federal government, and no one knew just which constitutional principles should guide the drafting of the TVA charter. Norris asked Roosevelt, over a working White House dinner, “What are you going to say when they ask you the political philosophy behind the TVA?” Roosevelt responded with a laugh: “I’ll tell them it’s neither fish nor fowl, but whatever it is, it will taste awfully good to the people of the Tennessee Valley.”

The president monitored the drafting closely, and when differing versions passed by the House and Senate went to conference, he guided the hands of the reconcilers, indicating point by point which parts of each version he preferred. The private power companies that felt threatened by the public competition of the TVA labored mightily to handicap the authority by one restriction and then another; they fought especially to keep the TVA out of the business of transmitting electrical power. The authority might build dams and install generators, the companies’ directors conceded grudgingly, but it should sell the electricity to the private sector at the powerhouse door. Only by this means would the public benefit from the competition of the capitalist marketplace. Norris led the struggle against the restrictions on TVA transmission, and Roosevelt backed him, reasoning that private control of transmission would negate whatever efficiencies the government achieved in generation. “It was a glorious fight right up the end,” Norris’s secretary reported after Norris and Roosevelt won, and the president signed the TVA into existence on May 18.

26.

RAY MOLEY HELPED ROOSEVELT WRITE HIS SECOND FIRESIDE CHAT. Eight weeks into the new administration, the president wished to give the American people a sense of what had been accomplished and an idea of what remained to be done. As they reviewed the text before Roosevelt went on the air, Moley flagged certain passages to ensure that they conveyed what Roosevelt intended. A sentence about a partnership between government and the private sector particularly caught his eye, as it indicated what seemed to be a striking departure in government policy. Moley knew about the dual strains of progressive thinking on the relationship between government and business—about Theodore Roosevelt’s tolerance of bigness in business so long as it was matched by bigness in government, and Woodrow Wilson’s insistence that smaller was better, in both government and business. The radio text, Moley noted, appeared to place Roosevelt on the side of his uncle. “You realize…,” Moley told the president, “that you’re taking an enormous step away from the philosophy of equalitarianism and laissez-faire.” Moley remembered the reaction: “FDR looked graver than he had been at any moment since the night before his inauguration. And then, when he had been silent a few minutes, he said, ‘If that philosophy hadn’t proved to be bankrupt, Herbert Hoover would be sitting here right now. I never felt surer of anything in my life than I do of the soundness of this passage.’”

The New Deal was criticized, then and later, for philosophical incoherence, among other shortcomings. The charge wasn’t entirely unjustified; much about Roosevelt’s program was extemporaneous and experimental. But at its heart the New Deal embodied a well-defined philosophy of American political economy—a concept of the proper relationship between American democracy and American capitalism that was radically at odds with inherited wisdom on the subject. Roosevelt had begun sharing his philosophy with the American people during the 1932 campaign; he continued the exposition with his May 1933 Fireside Chat.

Roosevelt reminded his listeners of the grave problems America had faced at the time of his inauguration. “The country was dying by inches,” he said. Prices had plummeted; jobs had disappeared; commerce had shriveled; banks were collapsing; mortgages were being foreclosed; lives were being ruined. The administration had faced two alternatives. The first was to let things work themselves out—to let prices find a new level on their own, to let the strongest banks survive and the rest go under, to let foreclosures proceed and the ousted homeowners scramble for other lodging or make do on the street. This was the course recommended by orthodox economic theory, Roosevelt said. But it was not the one he had chosen. “Such a policy was too much to ask the American people to bear. It involved not only a further loss of homes, farms, savings, and wages, but also a loss of spiritual values”—in particular the values of decency and fair play that made democracy possible.

He had chosen a different path. The fundamental problem of the depression, he explained, was an excess of capacity. “The people of this country have been erroneously encouraged to believe that they could keep on increasing the output of farm and factory indefinitely and that some magician would find ways and means for that increased output to be consumed with reasonable profit to the producer.” But there was no magician, and output couldn’t continue to grow unchecked. The old days of devil-take-the-hindmost competition must end. Planning—by government officials working closely with representatives of agriculture and industry—was essential.

Roosevelt had heard the criticism of planning, and he anticipated more. Most of it, he said, was foolishly or willfully ignorant. Charges that planning amounted to government control of industry were “wholly wrong.” Planning was a form of partnership between government and the private sector in which the government helped businesses do what they ought to do, and even wanted to do, but couldn’t do on their own. Roosevelt cited an example from the cotton textile industry. Most textile makers—perhaps 90 percent—were good corporate citizens, willing to put the interests of the community above their own narrow concerns. Among such companies agreements not to slash wages or engage in cutthroat competition were possible. “But what good is such an agreement,” Roosevelt asked, “if the other ten percent of cotton manufacturers pay starvation wages, require long hours, employ children in their mills, and turn out burdensome surpluses?” This was where the government could step in. “Government ought to have the right, after surveying and planning for an industry, to prevent, with the assistance of the overwhelming majority of that industry, unfair practices and to enforce this agreement.” Enforcement might require a modification or suspension of current antitrust laws and so ought to be handled carefully. “But these laws were never intended to encourage the kind of unfair competition that results in long hours, starvation wages, and overproduction.” Preventing such outcomes was simply prudent policy—and it was the essence of the philosophy of the New Deal.

ROOSEVELT’S VISION of a planned economy inspired the boldest initiative of the early New Deal. What became the National Recovery Administration began with an effort to aid railroads. This was fitting, in that railroads had been responsible for the rise of industry in America, and railroads had been the first sector of the economy to attract the regulative oversight of government. For decades the states and then the federal government had tried to keep the railroads healthy, but not too healthy. The railroads were the nation’s largest employers, having millions of workers on their payrolls. They were the nation’s largest income-producing investment, furnishing dividends to individuals and families, directly and via investment trusts, all across the country. They were the nation’s most important means of transportation, tying communities large and small into a single net. And they were the nation’s most chronically troubled industrial sector, suffering bouts of bankruptcies every decade or so. The states and the federal government had subsidized railroad construction during the nineteenth century; the federal government, especially, had regulated railroad operations during the twentieth century. Only rarely had the government bailed out failing railroads. The roads didn’t garner much sympathy among the general public, on account of their great size and their history of flouting the public interest. “The public be damned!” railroad magnate William Vanderbilt had said, and the public was often happy to return the favor. After the onset of the depression, Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation had floated loans to the railroads—an effort that secured the future of neither the roads nor Hoover.

Roosevelt had little love for the railroads, but he couldn’t ignore their plight. Dozens of railroads had gone into receivership by the time he took office; dividends were down by two-thirds. The roads had laid off more than 700,000 workers and had reduced or suspended service to thousands of communities. As bad as the economy already was, if the railroads sank further they would drag the broader economy still deeper into the pit. And until the railroads recovered, a general recovery would be almost out of the question.

There were other reasons for focusing on railroads, among the major industries. Roosevelt talked of broad-gauged government planning for the economy, but he had never actually attempted it. The railroads provided a place to start—a place to learn what worked and what didn’t. The railroads, moreover, engaged in interstate commerce, which brought them under the constitutional purview of the federal government. The Supreme Court, which was dominated by conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents, might challenge government planning for other industrial sectors, but it would be hard-pressed to toss out legislation regarding railroads.

Yet events conspired to blur Roosevelt’s focus on the railroads and to bring other sectors under the planning penumbra. Since the start of the depression, advocates of labor had suggested reducing the work week as a means of keeping people on payrolls. Presumably a company would employ a third more workers at thirty hours a week than it did at forty. But such could only be presumed, since workers were reluctant to see their paychecks cut in line with the reduction in their hours worked. The result, from management’s point of view, was that forty workers working thirty hours were likely to cost more than thirty workers working forty hours. Beyond this was the traditional resistance of owners and managers to any restraint on their freedom to run their businesses as they saw fit.

Nonetheless Hugo Black of Alabama introduced a thirty-hour bill in the Senate, and it promised to sweep all before it. Organized labor got behind the bill, with the American Federation of Labor threatening a general strike if it wasn’t enacted.

Roosevelt recognized the flaws in the thirty-hour concept, including the added labor costs to businesses that were often only a heartbeat from bankruptcy already, the difficulty of applying it to seasonal industries in which demand for labor varied from month to month, and the dubious constitutionality of the government’s stepping so egregiously between employers and employees. The Black bill proposed to get around the constitutionality issue by invoking the commerce clause of the Constitution and applying the thirty-hour rule only to companies that dealt in goods crossing state lines. Whether this device would withstand judicial scrutiny remained to be tested. Roosevelt wasn’t at all sure that it would, and he didn’t want to be the one making the test.

More fundamentally, Roosevelt’s understanding of the operations of a capitalist economy made him think a thirty-hour mandate was foolish and probably counterproductive. As much as Roosevelt favored economic planning, he didn’t think federal bureaucrats could do it alone—and still less did he think Congress was equipped for the job. The planners ought to include representatives of all those parties who would have to carry out the plans—owners, managers, workers, distributors.

Roosevelt urged the Senate to reconsider, but he couldn’t derail the thirty-hour bill, which rolled through the upper chamber by a large margin. The president’s only hope, it seemed, of heading off a similar success in the House was to get out in front of the whole issue of industrial planning, by something more sweeping than railroad reform.

As he prepared to do so, he reflected on his prior experience in the federal government. He recalled how America had mobilized during the World War and how the federal government had guided industry during that conflict. Wilson’s War Industries Board had apportioned production, orchestrated distribution, and otherwise directed the operation of the industrial economy. Though particular actions of the war board struck certain individuals and groups as unfair, arbitrary, or even irrational, on the whole its contribution to surmounting the crisis of the war was remembered favorably—even fondly, as the depression persisted. To many Americans at the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration, the war board offered a model for government leadership in the current crisis.

Robert Wagner, Roosevelt’s old colleague from the New York senate, wasn’t averse to the war board model, but he thought it didn’t give enough weight to the interests of workers. A federal senator since 1927, Wagner began drafting legislation for a national industrial board. Meanwhile Ray Moley lined up the Brookings Institution, a think tank with roots in the Progressive era and headquarters not far from the White House, to examine alternative paths to national economic planning. The commerce and labor departments likewise got in on the planning act, as did various outsiders who hoped to contribute to what promised—or threatened—to become the biggest expansion of government authority in decades.

Roosevelt, as was becoming his habit, let the different groups work away, saving his political capital for such decisions as couldn’t be made at a lower level. He weighed in periodically, as when he told reporters at an April press conference a story. “There was a certain little sweater factory in a little town—I won’t even give you the location of it—where they normally employed only about 200 people. It was the only industry in town. The owners of the little sweater factory and the employees had always been on exceedingly good terms.” But the depression had curtailed demand for sweaters, leaving this factory and its competitors overstaffed. “So the owners and the employees got together and talked the situation over. They only had about six weeks’ work in the whole past year, and all the other factories in the country had about the same kind of work—about six weeks out of the year. Well, the result was the population in this little town was practically starving to death. So they got together and decided that the thing they wanted to do was work, even though it would be at much reduced pay. So they figured out that if they could cut their wages 33 percent they could cut the cost of making these sweaters by the same amount, and in that way undersell every other sweater factory.” This was what they did. Their marketing agent, armed with the new price sheet, traveled to New York and filled his sales book with orders that would have gone to the company’s competitors. The result was a boom for the company, which now had enough work for three shifts a day.

The lesson Roosevelt drew was not the one many of the reporters must have expected. He didn’t praise the company and its workers for ingenuity and the shared willingness to sacrifice; instead he argued that the story revealed what was wrong with the current system. The sweater company’s policy was “bad business in all ways.” It was bad for the company’s workers, who were working harder than ever for less pay than before. It was bad for the sweater industry generally, because it forced several competitors out of business, with dire effects on their employees. It was bad for the morale of the region.

The solution to this problem and similar ones lay partly in the direction of the thirty-hour bill. The basic question, Roosevelt said, was “whether we can work out some kind of plan that will distribute the volume of consumption in a given industry over the whole industry.” The goal should be not to concentrate production in a small part of the industry—the lone sweater company, so to speak—but to share production among many firms. “We want to spread it out.”

Roosevelt sought allies in the business community for his planning concept. Somewhat surprisingly the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the foremost business lobby in America, had signaled its approval of government planning of the economy. The chamber normally wanted to keep the government at a distance, but the depression had hit its members so hard that they were willing to countenance almost anything to get the economy moving again. The chamber held a dinner at the Washington Auditorium; Roosevelt arrived after the dishes had been cleared. He patted himself on the back for a “slight but definite upturn in most industries” in the two months since his inauguration, and he expressed hope that a recent uptick in commodity prices would benefit farmers directly and workers indirectly, as rising prices translated into more jobs.

But the president had come this night not to report what the captains of industry—“who represent, in all probability, the majority of the employers of the nation,” Roosevelt said—could read for themselves in the papers. He came instead to request their cooperation in the task the administration had undertaken. He asked them to refrain from further wage cuts and in fact to raise wages as prices rose. This was only fair. “It is a simple fact that the average of the wage scale of the nation has gone down during the past four years more rapidly than the cost of living,” he said. “It is essential, as a matter of national justice, that the wage scale should be brought back to meet the cost of living and that this process should begin now and not later.”

A second request involved “bringing order out of chaos,” as Roosevelt put it. “You and I acknowledge the existence of unfair methods of competition, of cut-throat prices, and of general chaos. You and I agree that this condition must be rectified and that order must be restored.” The government could lead the restoration, but it couldn’t put the economy back together alone. “The attainment of that objective depends upon your willingness to cooperate with one another to this end, and also your willingness to cooperate with your government.” Roosevelt didn’t give the moguls time to reflect on whether the government was actually theirs; instead he put words in their mouths. “In almost every industry an overwhelming majority of the units of the industry are wholly willing to work together to prevent overproduction, to prevent unfair wages, to eliminate improper working conditions. In the past, success in attaining these objectives”—that is, the objectives Roosevelt ascribed to the business leaders—“has been prevented by a small minority of units in many industries. I can assure you that you will have the cooperation of your government in bringing these minorities to understand that their unfair practices are contrary to a sound public policy.”

Here Roosevelt was accurately summarizing what the business leaders were thinking, and it was what he was counting on to convince the capitalists of the wisdom of his ideas on planning. Roosevelt wouldn’t admit it, and he might not have fully appreciated it at the outset, but industrial planning constituted, at bottom, a cartelization of America’s major industries, with the federal government acting as a non-profit partner. Big government would join with big business and perhaps big labor to prop up prices, apportion markets, and prevent small operators from undercutting the deal.

A third request was somewhat broader. Roosevelt scanned the business crowd carefully, as if to peer into the hearts beneath the dinner jackets of the guests. It was human nature, he said, to view problems from the perspective of one’s own self or company. But the economic crisis had revealed the bankruptcy of this approach.

It is ultimately of little avail to any of you to be temporarily prosperous while others are permanently depressed. I ask that you translate your welfare into the welfare of the whole, that you view recovery in terms of the nation rather than in terms of a particular industry, that you have the vision to lay aside special and selfish interests, to think of and act for a well-rounded national recovery.

The hall rang with applause. “The president’s speech was received with an enthusiasm which can hardly be overemphasized,” the business correspondent of the New York Times observed. Roosevelt had chosen his audience well. Some, no doubt, were moved by his appeal to a higher, national vision of prosperity, but the line that really got their attention and approval was the one about the government cooperating with corporations against the unfair business practices of their competitors. For decades the government had opposed efforts by big business to prevent smaller companies from spoiling the market by competing too hard; Roosevelt appeared to be saying that the government not only would drop its opposition but would actively join the effort to suppress the spoilers. The government would be more than a member of the cartel; it would be the cartel’s police force. No wonder the moguls put down their cigars to cheer the president.

WINNING THE SUPPORT of business turned out to be the easy part. Keeping the various intellectuals, bureaucrats, and members of Congress marching in more or less the same direction was harder. Roosevelt let the several groups working on planning proceed, guessing that many of the differences among their proposals would work themselves out before he had to step in and that a modest degree of confusion might actually work in his favor. “We’re fiddling along with more legislation than any one man or any legislative body can accurately digest,” Hiram Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt’s running mate in 1912 and currently a Republican senator from California, wrote his sons. Johnson remained progressive enough to wish the president well. “I am still in the mood of trying anything that may be suggested, and the country is still in the mood, in my opinion, of following Roosevelt in anything he desires.” Other members echoed Johnson’s view. “This is the president’s special session of Congress,” a Texas representative declared. “He is the Moses who is leading us out of the wilderness.”

The modern Moses had problems akin to those of the original. The closer the promised land loomed, the more restive his followers grew. The rise in prices prompted investors to return to the stock market; in the several weeks after April 1 stocks rose by half. At this point the depression had last longer than any in recorded American history, and it stood to reason—and to Wall Street’s hopes—that the hard times had just about run their course. The innovations the president proposed might be unnecessary, even counterproductive. Roosevelt’s critics gained traction with each day’s rise in the market. “How much longer are we going to continue this delegation of power?” Republican senator Lester Dickinson of Iowa asked. “When are we going to learn our lesson?” William Borah of Idaho declared of the president, “No man can execute all the powers we have given to him.” Even Roosevelt’s allies began to complain. Henry Ashurst of Arizona, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, asserted, “Those senators have read history upside down, or have not read it at all, who do not realize that when you grant power it will not be used as you expect it to be used.”

“There is a revolt in the air in the Congress,” Hiram Johnson remarked in early June. “Men have followed him upstairs without question or criticism. Some individuals have been mute concerning their most cherished ideas in order that they might contribute what little they could in aid of the President’s efforts in this economic crisis. These men have about reached the limit of their endurance.” Johnson visited Roosevelt with a delegation from Congress and witnessed the president himself becoming testy. “He is losing a little of his astounding and remarkable poise, and I rather think a bit of his good nature,” Johnson said. “He wants us out of the way.”

He did indeed. What came to be called the Hundred Days had never been scheduled for that length, or any length. Roosevelt originally thought the special session should conduct a week or two’s business, dealing with matters that simply couldn’t wait until the regular session began the following January, and then recess, perhaps to return for another week or so in the fall. But members of Congress didn’t want to leave and then come back, and consequently Roosevelt thought to let them stay on, perhaps until the end of April or the beginning of May. Yet when the lawmakers proved so amenable to his various suggestions, he kept sending more, and more ambitious, measures, which stretched the session toward the hundred-day mark.

The onset of hot weather, though, in the era before indoor cooling, had always signaled the time to adjourn. A confrontational president might use the heat to extort favors from Congress; Roosevelt had watched Wilson do precisely this in 1913. But a president with Congress on his side typically humored the legislators’ desire to escape. Roosevelt accordingly urged the senators and representatives to wrap up their debates and pass the bills before them, that he might sign the bills and they all go home.

They did so, with greater haste in some instances than in others. The industrial planning bill showed the fingerprints of its many authors; it was, in Moley’s words, “by now a thorough hodge-podge of provisions designed to give the country temporary economic stimulation and provisions designed to lay the groundwork for permanent business-government partnership and planning.” The temporary stimulation took the form of a $3.3 billion appropriation for public works, directed by a Public Works Administration and intended to provide jobs for the unemployed. The groundwork for business-government partnership in planning was the provision for industrial codes that would encourage businesses to cooperate with one another and with labor rather than to continue the free-for-all that had prostrated so many of them.

“In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country,” Roosevelt said on signing the National Industrial Recovery Act on June 16. “It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” This was a radical—even revolutionary—statement, arrogating to government the responsibility for determining which businesses should exist and which not. Heretofore the government had let the market make that determination. Roosevelt elaborated on the new dispensation:

Throughout industry, the change from starvation wages and starvation employment to living wages and sustained employment can, in large part, be made by an industrial covenant to which all employers shall subscribe. It is greatly to their interest to do this, because decent living, widely spread among our 125,000,000 people, eventually means the opening up to industry of the richest market which the world has known. It is the only way to utilize the so-called excess capacity of our industrial plants.

The “industrial covenants” were the heart of Roosevelt’s new order, and they would begin, he said, with a “great spontaneous cooperation” to rehire millions of workers. “The idea is simply for employers to hire more men to do the existing work by reducing the work-hours of each man’s week and at the same time paying a living wage for the shorter week.” This wasn’t Roosevelt’s idea; it was the hostage he had given to the thirty-hour forces in Congress to get the bill he wanted. Roosevelt, like most successful politicians, had a knack for convincing himself of the truth of what served his purposes, but even he almost choked on the phrase “great spontaneous cooperation.” There might be cooperation, and he hoped it would be great, but he knew it wouldn’t be spontaneous. If spontaneity had been possible, the law he had just signed wouldn’t have been necessary.

Roosevelt fiddled the truth on other aspects of the law. He explained that the wage-lifting efforts of any single business, acting alone, would fail. “But if all employers in each trade now band themselves faithfully in these modern guilds, without exception, and agree to act together and at once, none will be hurt, and millions of workers, so long deprived of the right to earn their bread in the sweat of their labor, can raise their heads again.” Aside from the archaic language of “guilds”—the American steel industry, the most powerful industry in the world, a guild?—Roosevelt’s assertion that no one would be hurt was demonstrably false. The companies that were undercutting the market would be hurt; they weren’t engaged in their current behavior for the pleasure of it. Then there were consumers, who benefited from the competition among producers. They would suffer from the rise in prices the rise in wages would entail.

“Many good men voted this new charter with misgivings,” Roosevelt conceded, in the closest he ventured to an admission of the law’s imperfections. But he quickly added, “I do not share these doubts.” The reason he didn’t—or said he didn’t—was his experience of the World War. “I had part in the great cooperation of 1917 and 1918, and it is my faith that we can count on our industry once more to join in our general purpose to lift this new threat, and to do it without taking any advantage of the public trust which has this day been reposed without stint in the good faith and high purpose of American business.”

Those who were following Roosevelt’s argument must have been scratching their heads at this logical turn. American business had done very little during the previous few years to cause Americans—Democrats especially—to repose trust in its good faith and high purpose. Roosevelt himself had been elected by railing against American business. Moreover, the premise of the new law was that business couldn’t be trusted to act in the public interest without the strong arm of government to enforce acceptable behavior. His analogy to the country’s experience during the World War was problematic, to say the least. The war had been expected to be—and proved to be—brief; no one intended the wartime regimentation of industry to last more than a year or two. Even then, when the regimentation ended and government controls were lifted, the economy suffered severe inflation and labor unrest that made many Americans wonder whether the whole effort had been worth it. Roosevelt’s audience had to wonder—because he didn’t say—whether the new system of “industrial covenants” was to be temporary or permanent. If the former, it might be tolerable. If the latter—all bets were off.

Roosevelt plunged forward. He challenged industry to earn the trust the American people, acting through himself and Congress, were reposing in it. Taking a term from the war era, he warned against “slacker” firms—those that put private interest ahead of the general welfare. Nor was the potential for selfishness confined to single firms. “We can imagine such a thing as a slacker industry.” The American people would be watching.

He challenged labor to do its part. An essential aspect of the new law was section 7a, which greatly facilitated the organizing of labor in many industries. This section alone marked a radical shift in the relationship of the government to industry, for until now government had been either hostile or neutral toward labor’s long struggle to achieve a semblance of parity with management. But with favor came responsibility. “This is not a law to foment discord”—strikes and other forms of labor protest—“and it will not be executed as such. This is a time for mutual confidence and help.”

He challenged the American people. “There is no power in America that can force against the public will such action as we require. But there is no group in America that can withstand the force of an aroused public opinion. This great cooperation can succeed only if those who bravely go forward to restore jobs have aggressive public support and those who lag are made to feel the full weight of public disapproval.”

WITH THIS MESSAGE Roosevelt rang down the curtain on the special session. He sent the legislators back to their states and districts with his thanks for their “sincere and whole-hearted cooperation” and his congratulations for proving “that our form of government can rise to an emergency and can carry through a broad program in record time.”

The program was definitely broad. Congress in the Hundred Days approved fifteen major pieces of legislation, including the Banking Act, which was supplemented at the end of the session by the Glass-Steagall Act, a measure reorganizing the banking system and providing a degree of deposit insurance; the Economy Act, which allowed Roosevelt to rein in spending; the law establishing the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was already enrolling and training scores of thousands of young men; the Securities Act, with its requirements for fuller disclosure of stock issues; the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which made government the guarantor of the health of the nation’s farm industry; the measure creating the Tennessee Valley Authority, as a development agency in its own right and a yardstick for electrical power production; and the National Industrial Recovery Act, which put government in charge of industrial planning and pumped billions of dollars into public works. Other laws provided emergency relief to the poor and jobless, debt relief to farmers, and mortgage relief to home owners. On the authority delegated by Congress—either in 1917 or in 1933—Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard, undoing sixty years of American monetary policy.

It was a breathtaking record, and many members of Congress were convinced they’d need the full six months before the legislature reconvened simply to catch their breath. It was a record, as well, that placed more power—and more responsibility—in the hands of Roosevelt than any peacetime president had ever wielded or borne. “Now that Congress has gone and left him with the framework of an entirely new government system, the President must see that its cogs and shafts work reciprocally,” Arthur Krock observed. “The front wheels of the government engine cannot be permitted to revolve more swiftly than the rear wheels if the vehicle is to get where it is bound. Each administrator must see to it that his assistants pursue a certain policy, and the policy of each group must mesh as a general plan. In the most powerful nation of the world, with 130 millions of people to be dealt with, the labor is Herculean. It is more than that, for the strong man of mythology was pretty dumb. It is Olympian.”

Whether Roosevelt had the stuff of an Olympian remained to be determined. Many of those who had known him before his inauguration and who watched him during the Hundred Days expressed amazement at how much larger he now seemed. Norman Davis and Raymond Fosdick had worked with Roosevelt in the Wilson administration; Davis told Fosdick, after a visit to the White House: “Ray, that fellow in there is not the fellow we used to know. There’s been a miracle here.” Fosdick agreed. “There had been a miracle, an intellectual and spiritual metamorphosis induced by adversity and triumph,” he recounted later.

Those lonely years of struggle when, as he told me once, his sole, determined purpose was to move his big toe, had done something to his character—something fine and strong which brought him courage and bold confidence, a depth of penetration and a new self-control. From now on he feared nothing, and he faced the problems of his generation not only with level eyes but with sympathy and imagination.

Fosdick afterward recalled a formal dinner at the White House. Roosevelt shuffled down the long passage from the state dining room to the East Room, where the guests were gathered.

He used a cane and hung heavily on the arm of an aide; and his walk was the slow, painful, contorted shuffle of paralysis. As he approached the door the Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief,” and in a flash I realized with a lump in my throat that this apparently broken man was indeed the chief—with the capacity and magnetism of great leadership, and bearing on his face and in his handsome eyes the mark of confidence and power.

Ray Moley had his own interpretation of the Hundred Days. “None of us close to FDR lived normal lives,” Moley said of the period. “Confusion, haste, the dread of making mistakes, the consciousness of responsibility for the economic well-being of millions of people made mortal inroads on the health of some of us, like Will Woodin and Joe Robinson”—the Senate majority leader—“and left the rest of us ready to snap at our own images in the mirror.” Only the president appeared exempt. “Roosevelt preserved the air of a man who’d found a happy way of life. From March 4th, when he had reviewed his three-and-a-half-hour inaugural parade with every evidence of real enjoyment while Woodin wrestled with the question of how to open the banks, until June 16th, when Congress adjourned, I saw him lose his poise, self-confidence, and good humor but once.” This was in the fight over the budget, when an influential Republican refused compromise. “But for the rest, he was the ebullient, easy, calm man pictured in the Sunday rotogravure sections. This phenomenon, which had seemed remarkable enough during the campaign and banking crisis, now began to take on the appearance of the miraculous. I had, fleetingly, the illusion that Roosevelt had no nerves at all.” Roosevelt astonished Moley with his ability to turn from work to play, and back, with neither pause nor self-consciousness.

What began as a social encounter—say a swim in the White House pool, complete with splashings and duckings—would, with bewildering suddenness, be interrupted by a series of questions on the progress of the railroad legislation. What began as a serious evening’s discussion on the guarantee of bank deposits (which FDR distrusted), and whether or not the administration should get behind the Glass bank bill in view of the fact that Glass had accepted the guarantee of deposits to get support for the rest of the bill, would, long before a decision had been reached, become a leisurely night at home: FDR would be working on his stamp collection and start telling anecdotes of his Wilson days; Mrs. Roosevelt would wander in and out to call his attention to passages in a book that she was reading; the sweet-faced Missy LeHand and Grace Tully would appear with photographs for him to sign; Louis would stick his head in and ask wryly if he’d be breaking into this “important conference” if he told us the story of what he had said to Harold Ickes that morning.

Moley thought Roosevelt’s ability to shift so easily between work and pleasure was one secret of his tirelessness. There were others. “He had the successful executive’s ability to keep his mind clear of details once he had decided on a principle of action, together with a perfect faith that somehow, someone would always be around to take care of details satisfactorily.” Moley noted that the details in question could be quite substantial: whether the CCC should enroll a quarter- or a half-million men, whether the federal budget should be cut by four hundred million or five hundred million dollars. “He had the faculty of emerging from three hours of fifteen-minute interviews exhilarated, where another man would be done in.” This wasn’t because, like Calvin Coolidge, he didn’t talk back to his visitors. “FDR enjoyed himself for just the opposite reason. His visitors didn’t talk back to him. They couldn’t. It was he who called the conversational turns, he who would discourse at length on this or that, he who would catch and hold and visibly delight the caller.”

Moley would change his views regarding Roosevelt’s policies. But he never lost his admiration for the man’s remarkable gifts, including the ability to treat the weightiest subjects with ease and laughter. “In short, he was like the fairy-story prince who didn’t know how to shudder. Not even the realization that he was playing nine-pins with the skulls and thighbones of economic orthodoxy seemed to worry him.”

27.

DURING THE 1932 CAMPAIGN AND THE TRANSITION THAT FOLLOWED, when Roosevelt had cast scorn on Hoover’s argument that the causes of the depression lay overseas, he knew he was exaggerating and oversimplifying. He had reasons for doing so, some good and others dubious. The good reasons were that a new president had to start somewhere in tackling the depression and that domestic causes were more amenable to presidential influence than international ones. The foremost dubious reason was that without such exaggeration he might not have become the new president. Roosevelt was neither the first nor the last presidential candidate to convince himself America needed him more than abstract truth did.

Roosevelt’s polio had curtailed his foreign travel; an emergency trip to Europe in 1931, undertaken upon learning that Sara had contracted pneumonia while on vacation, constituted his only overseas journey in nearly fifteen years. But if he had ventured widely he would have seen disturbing signs that the structure of the peace crafted at Paris after the World War was collapsing. Germany had been humiliated by the war-guilt provision of the Versailles treaty and burdened by the open-ended reparations payments, but it hadn’t been crushed; the result was that Germany’s postwar experiment in democracy was almost guaranteed to fail and that Germans would blame their troubles on the Versailles system. The National Socialists certainly did so during the 1920s, under their strangely charismatic and brilliantly shrewd leader, Adolf Hitler. German Communists clumped the Versailles system with a broader critique of international capitalism and bourgeois democracy and squared off to fight the Nazis for control of the German government. As the depression set in, destroying such prosperity as the Germans had managed to achieve under the reparations-and-debt regime, the Communists gained support among the German people. The Soviet Union, the Communists said, was surviving the depression quite well; its socialist political economy should serve as a model for Germany’s own. The millions in Germany’s soup lines found the argument appealing and leaned left. Germany’s business and propertied classes found the argument appalling and leaned right; having to choose, as they saw it, between the Nazis and the Communists, they sided with the former. In January 1933—just as Roosevelt was interviewing potential cabinet secretaries—banker Kurt von Schroeder invited Hitler to his Cologne home, where he promised the support of German industrialists in exchange for Hitler’s pledge to leave their business interests untouched. A short while later Hitler, as head of the now-majority Nazi party, was asked by President Paul von Hindenburg to form a government.

Americans had difficulty taking Hitler seriously. Time magazine devoted five amused pages to his accession. “Last week, on the biggest morning of his life,” Henry Luce’s weekly reported in early February 1933, “this pudgy, stoop-shouldered, tooth-brush-mustached but magnetic little man bounded out of bed after four hours sleep, soaped his soft flesh with cold water, shaved with cold water, put on his always neat but never smart clothes and braced himself for the third of his historic encounters” with Hindenburg. The first had occurred the previous August, when Hindenburg had treated Hitler contemptuously. “‘With what power, Herr Hitler,’ growled Old Paul, ‘do you seek to be made Chancellor?’” Time reported. “‘Precisely the same power that Mussolini exercised after his March on Rome!’ chirped cheeky Adolf…. ‘So!’ bristled Der Reichspräsident with the air of a Prussian schoolmaster about to squelch an urchin. ‘Let me tell you, Herr Hitler, if you don’t behave, I’ll rap your fingers!’” The subsequent months were as unkind to Hindenburg and Hitler’s rivals as they were to Herbert Hoover, and by January the German president had been forced to accept Hitler as chancellor. But Henry Luce still found the little man and his program mildly ludicrous. He described the “beer-soused Bavarians” who had backed Hitler’s rise to power, labeled the Nazi party “fantastic” (in the sense of embodying Hitler’s fantasies), and declared of the Nazi agenda: “Its program consists of stentorian appeals to every form of German prejudice. Essentially Nationalists and patrioteers, the Nazis insert ‘Socialist’ into their party’s name simply as a lure to discontented workers…. Today it is no exaggeration to state that the Nazi Party is pledged to so many things that it is pledged to nothing…. In so far as it has a doctrine, National Socialism promises the bulk of the German people whatever they want.”

The snickering didn’t last long. Within the month of Hitler’s takeover—and just days before Roosevelt’s inauguration—the Nazis burned the Reichstag, the German parliament building. They blamed the Communists convincingly enough that the government and the German people went along with legislation outlawing the Communist party. On March 5, the day Roosevelt closed the banks in the United States, new German elections gave Hitler’s coalition a majority, which proceeded at once to award the chancellor near-dictatorial powers. In a first flexing, Hitler launched a national boycott of Jewish businesses and Jews in the professions.

Even so, in 1933 Japan appeared more threatening than Germany. Roosevelt had been to Germany several times, and though, like most other Americans, he found National Socialism puzzling, at least he understood the frame of reference within which the Nazis operated. Japan, by comparison, was a cipher. Roosevelt knew what other educated Americans knew: that Japan had modernized during the late nineteenth century by adopting Western technology, that Japan had employed its Western technology against China and then Russia in the long-standing contest for control of Korea and Manchuria, that Japan had fought on the side of the Allied powers during the World War, that Japan had joined the Washington Conference protocols on naval arms limitations. Roosevelt also knew that the Japanese had taken offense at various actions by the Western powers over the years. But he didn’t know—and almost no one else in the West knew, either—how much of the offense was honestly felt and how much was diplomatic melodrama. Were the Japanese really upset at the United States because Theodore Roosevelt persuaded their government to accept a reasonable settlement of the Russo-Japanese War? Did American restrictions on immigration sting as badly as some Japanese spokesmen—including the Japanese ambassador to the United States, who warned of “grave consequences” for U.S.-Japanese relations—claimed? Did the refusal of the Paris peace conference to embrace racial equality truly wound the Japanese psyche? Did the lesser tonnage allowed the Japanese navy at the Washington Conference matter to ordinary Japanese?

All Roosevelt could do was ask himself what he would have done in the place of Japan’s leaders. He was a politician; they were politicians, after their fashion. He interpreted the world, for political purposes, in a way that served his interests; he supposed they did, too. He would have cited—and perhaps exaggerated—American sensitivities in explaining to other governments what he could and couldn’t do; he imagined Japanese leaders did the same.

Yet certain aspects of Japanese policy were undeniable. In September 1931, at the behest of the nationalist military officers who increasingly dominated Japanese foreign policy, Japanese troops guarding a railroad across Manchuria claimed they had been attacked by Chinese bandits at Mukden. The Japanese army responded by occupying the rest of Manchuria, converting China’s northeasternmost province—and the one richest in resources essential to industrial development—into a Japanese puppet state called Manchukuo. The speed of the occupation made obvious that it had been planned in advance and that the whole affair had been staged.

The hijacking of Manchuria marked a resumption of the struggle for East Asia. The Japanese apparently guessed that the Western powers, absorbed as they were in their own economic troubles, would do little to hinder their expansion. The West proved Tokyo correct. The League of Nations discussed the affair interminably, and the United States—which was to say, the Hoover administration—merely refused to recognize the independence of Manchukuo. The American policy did not prevent Japan from exploiting the people and resources of Manchuria, but it was better than nothing. Or so Hoover hoped.

Days before Roosevelt’s inauguration, the League of Nations finally acted on the Manchurian question. Although the United States remained outside the League, all the members but one voted to adopt America’s non-recognition policy as the League’s own. Japan should leave Manchuria and return it to China. The sole dissenter to the League vote was Japan, which declared that it would never leave Manchuria—Manchukuo—but would leave the League at once. China was a “fiction,” the Japanese delegate to the League snorted on his way out the door. By this time Japanese troops controlled the entire region north of the Great Wall, which hadn’t kept out invaders when it was built and didn’t seem likely to keep them out now. China—whether fictional or real—lay open to further depredation.

ROOSEVELT REALIZED that sooner or later he would have to deal with the Nazis and the Japanese. Yet he hoped to postpone that day as long as possible, the better to focus on reviving the American economy. Another aspect of foreign policy, however, was related intrinsically to his revival plans and couldn’t be so easily kicked down the road. The major trading nations were pushing harder than ever for the international economic conference, which, they hoped, would coordinate efforts to fight the depression. The United States, with the world’s largest economy as well as the biggest balance of credits to debts, was the obvious linchpin of any such conference. Yet many Americans were skittish, partly because the conference was being organized under the auspices of the League of Nations but mostly because any conference would almost certainly pressure the United States, as the great creditor, to forgive or reduce the debts it was owed. Franklin Roosevelt, as a candidate and then as president-elect, had promised support for the conference in general terms without committing himself to anything in particular.

As president he was in no greater hurry to sign on to the conference scheme, which was shaping up as a comprehensive approach to debt, reparations, tariffs, and exchange rates. Roosevelt’s dance card was full with his domestic reforms; the international conference would have to wait.

But it wouldn’t wait forever. One foreign leader after another trooped to Washington to tell him so. Ramsay MacDonald, the British prime minister, arrived in mid-April. Roosevelt didn’t expect much from MacDonald, a socialist (that is Laborite) who, “as everyone knew,” according to Ray Moley, “was merely a front for as hard-boiled a Conservative Government as England had had for many years.” Yet MacDonald was the prime minister, and Roosevelt judged him “a man of liberal ideas” who might serve as a vehicle for knocking some sense into the “special-privilege people” who controlled the Conservative party. Whether on his own or at the behest of his Tory backers, MacDonald adopted the Hooverian view that international cooperation was essential to any effort to relieve the depression. The prime minister took a political chance coming to Washington. Recent trends to the contrary notwithstanding, the British still fancied themselves the arbiters of the world’s economic fate. The fact remained that the sun never set on the British empire, and so long as it didn’t, British governments could pretend to British voters that London somehow kept it aloft. Never before had a British prime minister traveled hat in hand to the former American colonies; if MacDonald returned to Britain without some commitment by Roosevelt to a constructive policy, his government would suffer severe embarrassment.

The talks went less well than MacDonald hoped. Roosevelt surrounded himself with advisers, including Cordell Hull, the secretary of state; Ray Moley, Hull’s deputy but in fact Roosevelt’s inside man at the State Department; and Herbert Feis, Hull’s own economic adviser. Key Pittman, the Democratic chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, who favored high tariffs and a return to silver currency in some form, sat in as Roosevelt’s witness to Congress that the president wasn’t selling American interests out to the wily Brits. MacDonald couldn’t break through Roosevelt’s screen of defenders, and the talks yielded nothing of substance. “It was never the purpose of the present discussions to conclude definitive agreements,” a joint communiqué asserted blandly. “They were designed to explore and to map out the territory to be covered.”

The French came calling next. The position of Édouard Herriot was even more problematic than that of MacDonald, for though he had thrice been premier, at the time of his visit he was between leadership posts. Nor did he represent what seemed to be a broad current of French thinking on economic issues. But Roosevelt had known him for years, and the acquaintance prompted the French government to send him over.

Herriot wanted to talk about debts; in particular he wanted Roosevelt to offer a reduction in what France was expected to pay. Roosevelt refused, albeit politely. He explained that Congress had taken a firm stand against reducing the foreign debts; consequently his options were limited. He noted, by way of giving Herriot some hope, that President Hoover had refused even to discuss the debt issue with the French (or the others in arrears), but now he—Roosevelt—was talking with Monsieur Herriot about that very subject. As additional encouragement, he told Herriot that if France made good on the payment that was due in December, he would ask Congress for the power to renegotiate the debts. Because Herriot was an old friend, he wasn’t surprised when Roosevelt illustrated his position on the debts with a homey example. He described a landlord who rented a house to another man. The renter ran into difficulty and was late with a payment. The landlord was sympathetic. “Pay as much as you can, but remain in possession of the house,” he said. Roosevelt’s precise point wasn’t clear—France could hardly be evicted from its own country—but the tone was encouraging.

After Herriot left Washington the line merely grew longer. The Canadian prime minister was followed by the Italian finance minister, who gave way to the Chinese finance minister, who passed the arriving Mexican finance minister. The vice governor of the Bank of Japan came after a personal envoy from the German government and representatives of various rank from Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. Simultaneous conversations took place between officials of the State Department and their counterparts from foreign governments, until more than fifty countries had filed through the American executive branch. But despite the diligence the diplomats devoted to the exercises, and for all the sincerity they attempted to convey, most of those involved suspected that they were wasting their time. Until Roosevelt tipped his hand, the discussions among the lower downs didn’t really matter.

HE GAVE A HINT in May. The London economic conference would be one of two international extravaganzas that season. A disarmament conference had been at work in Geneva since the previous year, and it remained in session. One reason the conference continued, despite minimal progress, was that disarmament is never simple. The other reason was that Germany’s new government was demanding the right to rearm. Hitler and the Nazis contended that the Versailles settlement was unfair and unrealistic; as a sovereign nation, they said, Germany ought to be able to defend itself. Britain and France refused, recalling what the Germans had done with their weapons the last time they possessed them. Britain’s MacDonald and France’s Herriot, on their visits to Washington, implored Roosevelt to stand by them in resisting Hitler’s demands.

Roosevelt responded by sending a message to most of the world’s governments urging their cooperation in ensuring the success of both the London economic conference and the Geneva disarmament conference. Together, he said, the conferences would go far toward determining the fate of humanity for a generation to come. In his message Roosevelt called for the entire elimination of offensive weapons. Nations armed, he said, for two reasons: “first, the desire, disclosed or hidden, on the part of governments to enlarge their territories at the expense of a sister nation;…second, the fear of nations that they will be invaded.” Roosevelt asserted that the governments intending aggression were few but had an effect far beyond their numbers. The majority of countries retained weapons because they feared attack. Their fear was justified, in that military technology had lately given an advantage to attackers. The solution, Roosevelt said, was to banish offensive weapons. “Defenses automatically will become impregnable, and the frontiers and independence of every nation will become secure.” The goal for the Geneva disarmament conference, therefore, must be “the complete elimination of all offensive weapons.” This was the test of international good faith—this and cooperation at the London economic conference. “If any strong nation refuses to join with genuine sincerity in these concerted efforts for political and economic peace, the one at Geneva and the other at London, progress can be obstructed and ultimately blocked.” The world would be watching, and it would hold the non-cooperators to account.

HITLER DIDN’T realize how ironic Roosevelt’s words, especially those about the London economic conference, would seem before long. The German chancellor was scheduled to deliver a major speech to the Reichstag the next day, and most observers expected more of the anti-Versailles vitriol that had brought him to power. Already Americans realized that Hitler was one to watch, and American radio stations announced that they would carry his speech.

Roosevelt tuned in at the White House. Leaning close to a radio in his office and recalling what he had learned of the German language in his youth, he provided a running translation of Hitler’s speech for Louis Howe and Ray Moley. The president heard both less and more than he had anticipated. That Hitler blamed Germany’s current troubles on the postwar settlement was no surprise. “All problems at present causing unrest are founded on the shortcomings of the peace treaty,” Hitler asserted. “The idea of rendering useful service to other peoples by destroying economically a people of 65,000,000 is so absurd that nobody can dare today openly to expound it.” But Germany wasn’t the sole sufferer from the ill-begotten pact, Hitler said; the artificial arrangements imposed on European trade and investment by the Versailles system had so crippled Europe’s economy as to be directly responsible for the depression that ravaged the region.

Some of Hitler’s listeners—perhaps even Roosevelt—expected the chancellor to declare that the Versailles system might be overturned by force. His earlier speeches and writings had revealed no reluctance to threaten armed action to achieve his goals for Germany. But on this day he abjured the use of force. “No new European war could replace the present unsatisfactory conditions by something better,” he said. “On the contrary—new wars, new sacrifices, new uncertainties, new economic distress would result.” At the end of that road lay “a Europe sinking into communistic chaos.”

Hitler surprised Roosevelt further by praising the president’s disarmament message. “For President Roosevelt’s proposal, the German government is indebted with warm thanks,” the chancellor said. “It is ready immediately to endorse this method of remedying the international crisis because it, too, believes that without a solution of the disarmament question no enduring economic recovery is possible.” The president’s proposal for eliminating offensive weapons and renouncing aggression was brilliant and wise, and Germany would support it wholeheartedly. Hitler reminded the Reichstag—and Roosevelt and the rest of the world beyond Berlin—that the Versailles treaty committed even the victors of the war to work toward disarmament. If those countries lived up to their commitments, they would have Germany’s full cooperation.

“If, however”—and here Hitler got to the part Roosevelt was waiting for—“the others are not willing to carry out the disarmament provisions under the Versailles treaty, which is equally binding upon them, then Germany must at least insist on its claim to equality.” The natural edge in Hitler’s voice sharpened and his high pitch rose further as he avowed his determination to defend Germany’s rights. Germany would not submit to anything that perpetuated the inferior status imposed on it at Versailles. Should the other powers attempt to keep Germany down, they would have themselves to blame for what followed. “Responsibility for the political and economic consequences—the chaos that such an attempt would lead Europe into—would fall on those who resorted to such means against a people who are doing nothing to harm the world.”

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS organizing committee for the London economic conference invited sixty-seven nations—essentially every independent country it could think of, as well as India and a few other important dependencies. Sixty-six arrived in mid-June 1933 (Panama pleaded poverty and declined to attend). The delegates met in the London Geological Museum and were seated alphabetically by their countries’ names in French. The conference was the first of its kind, and one of the most august meetings in world history to that date. Switzerland sent its head of state (President Edmund Schulthess), while eight countries were represented by their heads of government, twenty by their foreign ministers, and the rest by their finance ministers, central bankers, or other officials. Roosevelt dispatched his foreign minister, Secretary of State Cordell Hull. James Cox, Roosevelt’s partner in defeat from 1920, would be Hull’s deputy.

The centrality of the Americans to the conference was indicated by the fact that its commencement had been delayed to let Roosevelt clear the most pressing part of his domestic agenda before turning to international economic matters. (The conference might have been pushed back even further if not for the British grouse season. Ramsay MacDonald informed Roosevelt on his visit to Washington that if the conference was still meeting in the fall when the bird shooting started, the British delegates would absent themselves en masse.) Having waited for the Americans—while the world economy remained in chaos—the conference naturally expected much of them.

Cordell Hull expected much of the Americans, too. “If we are to succeed,” the secretary of state told the delegates, “narrow and self-defeating selfishness must be banished from every human heart within this council chamber.” The gathered nations must put the welfare of the world before the welfare of single countries. “If, which God forbid, any nation should obstruct and wreck this great conference with the short-sighted notion that some of its favored interests might temporarily profit while thus indefinitely delaying aid for the distressed in every country, that nation will merit the execration of mankind.” Woe to the isolationist, who failed to appreciate the interconnectedness of the calamities visiting the peoples of the world. “For him no panic has an international character, cause, or cure,” Hull said sarcastically. “He credulously believes that the present depression just happened to come upon all the countries at the same time, and that despite demonstrated failure to do so since 1929, each by its own local program can at will restore full prosperity.”

“I felt almost physically ill,” Ray Moley wrote in response to Hull’s address. The secretary of state was describing the position Roosevelt had staked out in the campaign and had never relinquished. Strangely, Roosevelt appeared willing for Hull to speak as he did. The president had read Hull’s speech in advance and had suggested that certain passages be toned down. But otherwise he let Hull excoriate the very attitude he—Roosevelt—had made a central part of his approach to foreign policy.

The heart of the matter was whether the American government would cooperate with the governments of the other major powers to restore the international economic order the depression had thrown into disarray. A comprehensive solution would have involved debts and reparations, tariffs, and exchange rates. As poorly as the American economy was performing, the United States remained the strongest country in the world in terms of its overall production and balance of payments. What the conference almost unanimously wanted was for the United States to employ its strength to lift some of the burden of the depression off the rest of the world.

Roosevelt was willing to take certain steps in that direction. With other Democrats he had long decried the high-tariff policy of the Republicans, and he believed that the tariff wars of the last few years had done much to make the current situation worse. In his talks with France’s Herriot and the other foreign visitors he proposed a tariff truce—participating countries would agree not to raise their tariffs further—as a first step toward tariff reduction and a restoration of trade. But, on his own account and because he knew members of Congress were watching, he refused to engage in anything like unilateral tariff disarmament. As president, he had to protect American producers.

Political considerations figured even more importantly in his refusal to write down the debts. Roosevelt was enough the realist to recognize that if the governments that owed America money weren’t given relief, they might simply default. The United States would have little recourse in that event. In the past, unrequited creditors had occasionally seized customhouses or removable assets, but the days of gunboat diplomacy were over. In any event France was hardly Egypt or Nicaragua. Yet though the financial outcome would be the same, default would have fewer political repercussions for Roosevelt than forgiveness. The former would be blamed on ungrateful foreigners, the latter on the president himself.

The tariff and debt questions loomed over the London conference, but monetary exchange rates were the rub of the meeting (which was formally called the International Monetary and Economic Conference). As long as the governments of the major trading powers had stuck to the gold standard, it prevented them from manipulating their currencies to gain an edge over one another. But with gold falling by the wayside, the governments could avert a currency war only by some kind of international agreement—which was precisely the objective of the London conference. Everyone expected the United States to insist on a devaluation of the dollar, to make American goods cheaper in foreign markets; most believed a moderate degree of devaluation to be justifiable, inevitable, or both. But the important thing was to write the devaluation into some kind of international agreement that other countries could bank on—literally and figuratively—in charting their own courses.

Hull’s statement to the conference suggested that the American administration was willing to participate in such an agreement. Yet simultaneous noises from Washington cast into question Hull’s ability to speak for the administration. Early reports from London that an agreement on currency stabilization was near prompted the administration to issue a denial. “Such reports cannot be founded in fact,” Treasury Secretary Woodin declared. “Any agreement on this subject will be reached in Washington, not elsewhere.”

The striking thing about this statement was not its content but its tone. Of course the president would make the final decision about any accord negotiated in London. But for the administration to belabor this fact in language so stark suggested that its delegates in London were negotiating either blindly or in bad faith.

Or that the president was playing a deep game. Roosevelt was not attending the London conference, but he bargained as hard as anyone who did attend. By keeping the Europeans off balance, he hoped to preserve his options and enhance the likelihood of achieving what he considered success. He revealed a little of his thinking at a press conference the day after Woodin’s broadside went out. The president, cautioning reporters that he was speaking “absolutely off the record,” ticked off three considerations regarding the reports of discrepancy between the views of the American delegation in London and those of the administration in Washington. “In the first place, our people over there obviously could not conclude any kind of an agreement without submitting it back here to the State Department and to me. That is perfectly clear.” The second point was equally clear. “That is that they”—Hull and the delegation in London—“have not communicated with us in any shape, manner, or form.” The reason this second point required stressing, though Roosevelt naturally didn’t say so, was that it wasn’t true. The president was getting regular reports from Hull via William Phillips at the State Department. But though the reporters might have guessed at this connection, they couldn’t confirm it, and he continued shamelessly: “Therefore, the third point is equally clear, and that is that they have entered into absolutely no agreement on the other side, tentative or otherwise.” How he would have known this if he hadn’t received any communication from London might have puzzled the reporters, but none pressed him on the matter.

Roosevelt brought the reporters into his confidence, or appeared to do so. “The reason I say this has to be strictly off the record,” he said, “is because it looks to me a little bit as if some of our friends belonging to the other nations in London are trying to spread around the idea that we have entered into some kind of an agreement, and then, if it does not go through, try to put the blame for a failure to stabilize on us…. I don’t think it would be above some people to do just that very thing.”

A reporter asked, “Inasmuch as they are using propaganda of this sort, don’t you think there should be some kind of reaction?” Presumably the reporter meant a reaction from the president himself, as opposed to Woodin’s statement.

“No, I am just wising you to it,” Roosevelt replied.

“Can we use this stuff ourselves?”

“No, just keep it in the back of your heads.”

Roosevelt had another reason for speaking off the record, beyond his desire to keep his options open. The money markets were rife with speculation as to what the London conference would produce, and the slightest leak of the president’s intentions could send the dollar spiking upward or plunging down against the pound and other currencies.

Given that he was speaking off the record anyway, the reporters asked what Roosevelt considered an acceptable stabilization agreement.

Rather than respond, even off the record, he obfuscated. “Oh, my Lord, it would take me two hours, and then neither one of us would know,” he said.

A reporter tried another approach. “Is the administration willing to enter into some sort of a stabilization agreement?”

“That sort of question again is too uncertain,” Roosevelt said. “It depends on what kind of a stabilization agreement and where it was and what it was.”

ROOSEVELT’S REFUSAL to commit to a stabilization plan provoked consternation in Europe. The French eyed the Americans with the darkest suspicion. Le Monde assailed the “permanent lack of accord” among the Americans and said that the United States should suspend its participation in the conference until the administration “decides on a monetary policy.” The Germans were almost as skeptical. “The Americans are getting themselves disliked at the World Economic Conference,” one German paper asserted. “They embarrass the whole work of the conference.” Another German daily declared, “As it appears now, the Rooseveltian policy looks like a soap bubble that ought to burst just as soon as the failure of the London conference raises again the waves of general distrust and carries them toward the shores of the New World.” Even members of the American delegation pleaded for guidance. “If you love us at all,” James Cox cabled Roosevelt in late June, “don’t give us another week like this one.”

To calm the waters Roosevelt sent Ray Moley to London. The same reporters and editorialists who had noted the divergence between Cordell Hull’s views and the opinions previously articulated by the president concluded that Moley was going to London to chastise Hull or at least to impose the president’s views on the American delegation and perhaps the conference.

Moley didn’t want to go. The cloud already over the conference boded ill for its outcome. Nor did the mood in Washington give much hope. Prices had been rising steadily since March, and nearly everyone associated with the administration thought this a promising development that ought to be allowed to continue. An agreement in London to stabilize the dollar (and other currencies) would cut it short. Moley had spoken with Hugh Johnson, who would head the newly established National Recovery Administration, before leaving Washington. Johnson’s job was to establish codes for American industry, codes that would specify wages and prices for hundreds—eventually tens of thousands—of goods and services. “I want to ask you one simple question,” Moley said to Johnson. “As head of the NRA, what is your feeling about a possible agreement to stabilize?” Johnson responded, “All right, here’s my answer: An agreement to stabilize now on the lines your boy friends in London are suggesting would bust to hell and gone the prices we’re sweating to raise.” Johnson allowed that stabilization would make sense at some opportune moment. “But that moment isn’t now.” Comparable conversations with officials of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the NRA’s rural counterpart, elicited similar responses.

What did the president think? Roosevelt experienced the international pressure for stabilization more directly than Johnson, but he was scarcely more inclined to short-circuit what looked to be the best hope for America’s swift recovery. He told Moley he could accept an agreement of some sort, provided it allowed sufficient flexibility for prices to rise further. “If nothing else can be worked out, I’d even consider stabilizing at a middle point of $4.15”—the dollar price of the British pound—“with a high and low of $4.25 and $4.05.” The president continued:

I’m not crazy about it, but I think I’d go that far. The essential thing is that you impress on the delegation and the others that my primary objective is to raise the world price level. Tell them what our American recovery program is doing to raise prices, relieve debtors, and increase purchasing power. If other nations will go along and work in our direction, as they said they would when they were in Washington, then we can cooperate. If they won’t, then there’s nothing to cooperate about.

MOLEY SAILED for Europe on June 21 and arrived in London a week later. His appearance was much anticipated, despite Roosevelt’s efforts to play it down. For the record, Moley was a “liaison officer” between the president and the American delegation, but the record, in this case, wasn’t persuasive. “Few are so credulous as to be deceived by the official explanations of Professor Moley’s trip,” the New York Times editorialized. Moley was going to London to crack the American delegation into line and deliver the president’s decision. And none too soon. “It is time to drop polite pretenses and have the truth bluntly stated,” the Times said.

The assumption that Moley was bearing Roosevelt’s version of truth, and that this version would allow the world to begin its ascent from the depths of the depression, caused the conference members to hold their breath at Moley’s approach. “Moley’s reception in London was surpassed only by those given to kings,” Hull remembered, his jealousy still showing after fifteen years. Delegations of high officials, newspapermen, and others, their emotions aroused, hurried down to Plymouth to meet Moley and vie with one another in paying him tribute.” In London Moley called on Hull, as was the secretary of state’s due. But the press ignored Hull in favor of the president’s personal envoy. “He appeared as the only person among the Americans whom they had the slightest interest in seeing,” Hull said. “During the few days that followed, prime ministers and other top officials of governments flocked after Moley as if he were the Pied Piper. I continued to keep in the background as if I were the most insignificant individual hanging about the conference.”

Moley appreciated the attention even while he understood that it wasn’t for him, but rather for what he was thought to represent. What he did not understand was that Roosevelt, despite what he had said before Moley’s departure, hadn’t made up his mind about the conference. The favorable news for the American economy continued. The dollar fell further against the pound; a week after Roosevelt told Moley he’d accept stabilization at $4.15, the price topped $4.40. Roosevelt would have been punishing American producers—the very farmers, manufacturers, and workers he was trying to help with the agriculture administration and the NRA—to accept the deal he suggested to Moley. The more he thought about it, and the more he watched the money markets, the less appealing an explicit stabilization formula appeared. To accept a stabilization scheme—a system of fixed exchange rates—would handcuff the American economy to those of Britain and France. Under current circumstances, this seemed a doubtful bargain.

Moreover, it would handcuff him. The whole thrust of the Hundred Days was to free the president to manage the American economy as he saw fit. Vigorous leadership—his vigorous leadership—was necessary to deal with the emergency, Roosevelt believed. Congress had granted him scope to exercise that leadership at home. To accept a stabilization scheme abroad would undermine much of what he had done during the last three months. He had talked the British and French along, acting the good economic ally but postponing a decision on exchange rates till he had finished with Congress and got the New Deal well started. Now that Congress had adjourned and the New Deal was in motion, he thought seriously about stabilization for the first time. He decided he didn’t like it.

On July 3 he announced his decision. To prevent any further confusion, he spoke in his own voice and in the most straightforward, even shocking, language. The idea that exchange rates could restore prosperity—the consensus of the London conference—was a “specious fallacy,” he said. Nations must look inward rather than outward. “The sound internal economic system of a nation is a greater factor in its well-being than the price of its currency.” For the conference to hold recovery hostage to a delusion of fixed exchange rates would be “a catastrophe amounting to a world tragedy.”

ROOSEVELT’S MESSAGE blew up the London conference. “A Manifesto of Anarchy,” the Manchester Guardian headlined it. The London Daily Express declared, “America is the bonfire boy of the world. She lights a fire which might have been a beacon, then runs away to watch it burn itself out.” The official complaints were more circumspect but hardly less forceful. Ramsay MacDonald, speaking for Britain, Georges Bonnet for France, and Guido Jung for Italy told Hull they had been double-crossed. “All stated very clearly that your yesterday’s message was entirely inconsistent with what you had said in Washington,” the secretary of state cabled Roosevelt.

When Moley met with MacDonald, the prime minister was a wreck. “I have rarely seen a man more distraught than he was that morning,” Moley wrote. “He turned a grief-stricken face to me as I came in, and he cried out, ‘This doesn’t sound like the man I spent so many hours with in Washington. This sounds like a different man. I don’t understand.’” MacDonald declared that the conference was finished, murdered by Roosevelt. “And then, with a curious kind of petulance, he began to speak of what the conference meant to him. For years he had dreamed of such a conference. Its successful outcome, he’d hoped, would be the crowning achievement of his long career. ‘The shadows,’ he said, were already ‘descending’ around him.”

MacDonald never recovered from the failure of the London conference, which sputtered along for a few more weeks before the delegates acknowledged its hopelessness and gave up. Roosevelt denied responsibility. A reporter asked, just after Roosevelt dropped his bombshell, if the administration would change its policy if the conference appeared to be “going on the rocks.” “Don’t put it that way,” Roosevelt responded. “We don’t think it is going on the rocks.”

Yet he refused to change course as the craft hit bottom. When the conference ultimately adjourned in early August, Roosevelt blithely attributed the delegates’ departure to that British passion for grouse. A reporter, evidently thinking of a vacation, laughingly said America ought to import some grouse. “We have enough grousing in this country,” Roosevelt rejoined with an even heartier laugh. He added—“literally and strictly and entirely in the family and off the record”—that one of the contributors to the failure of the conference—“don’t put this down”—was “the Continental and London press. It was rotten, absolutely rotten, and they gave us a dirty deal from the time we left here until we got home…. The whole press just ganged us from the start to the finish. And their press were told what to say by their governments. And of course the French press is owned by anybody that will buy it. And there you are. It was a rotten situation.”

Ray Moley was another casualty of Roosevelt’s bomb throwing. The president’s reversal embarrassed Moley badly. Cordell Hull shed no tears for his assistant. “That piss-ant Moley,” Hull called him. “Here he curled up at my feet and let me stroke his head like a hunting dog, and then he goes and bites me in the ass!” Hull complained to Roosevelt about Moley’s habit of communicating to the president behind his back. Hull got hold of one secret message, a cable in which Moley asserted to Roosevelt that Key Pittman was the “only member of delegation able intellectually and aggressively to present your ideas to the conference.” Hull had known that Moley looked down on him, but this was too much, as he made clear to Roosevelt.

The president had hired Hull not for his intellect but for his loyalty and his ability to get along with Congress. Forced to choose between Moley and Hull, the president took the part of the secretary. He transferred Moley, who, recognizing the move for what it portended, resigned from the administration. “There has been a unanimous sigh of relief from everybody in the Department,” Sumner Welles, the undersecretary of state, wrote. A journalist who had followed the Hull-Moley story from the start observed, “Hull’s gaunt figure and downcast eyes are enough to move one to tears, until one remembers the stiletto protruding from Moley’s back.”

28.

WHEN TIME NAMED HUGH JOHNSON ITS “MAN OF THE YEAR” IN DECEMBER 1933, Franklin Roosevelt could have been forgiven for feeling slighted. Roosevelt was the architect of the National Recovery Administration, Johnson merely its executor. But the president had to admit that Johnson’s biography made better copy than his own, and he was happy for the lightning the NRA attracted to strike elsewhere than the White House.

Johnson grew up among the Plains Indians and homesteaders of Kansas and Oklahoma. He attended West Point with Douglas MacArthur and chased Pancho Villa across northern Mexico with John Pershing and George Patton. A certain flair for administration called him to the attention of his superiors, and upon American entry into the World War he was handed the job of directing the military draft. America’s most recent draft—during the Civil War—had provoked murderous riots; Johnson’s draft went blessedly smoothly. His secret was the marshaling of public opinion behind the draft. “If public opinion in such a country as this could not be persuaded to support a war, this country could not support that war,” he explained.

Franklin Roosevelt watched Johnson from down the hall at the State-War-Navy building and made a mental note. Johnson moved on to the War Industries Board, where—by now a brigadier general—he teamed up with Bernard Baruch to commandeer American industry. “I went away with one outstanding lesson burned into my brain,” Johnson said afterward: “Government emergency operations are entirely different from routine governmental operations.” And coordination of economic activity was crucial. “Lack of it is so dangerous that it may completely frustrate the almost unlimited power of this country.”

Johnson retired to private industry and better pay after the war, only to reconnect with Baruch in time to campaign for Roosevelt in 1932. The three men reminisced about their common experience in the World War, and they discussed how to apply it to the depression. “If industry can thus act as a unit for the purposes of war,” Johnson said, “why cannot it also act as a unit for the purposes of peace?”

Even before the National Industrial Recovery Act created the National Recovery Administration, Roosevelt floated Johnson’s name as the man who would head the NRA, to test the reaction of the press and the public. Whoever headed the NRA would be extraordinarily powerful, the czar of the American economy. In 1932 Johnson had written and printed for friends a blueprint for an American dictatorship. How serious it was supposed to be became a point of contention. Johnson’s script was framed as a proclamation by “Muscleinny, dictator pro tem,” which suggested a certain tongue-in-cheekiness. But the thrust of the argument was sober enough. Johnson called the depression a “ridiculous if ghastly paradox” and declared that the solution was “singleness of control and immediate action.” He proceeded to lay out a program of emergency powers granted by Congress to the president that looked eerily like the agenda of the Hundred Days. With critics already calling Roosevelt a dictator, the last thing he needed was to nominate someone seen as an acolyte of the Duce.

Roosevelt also wanted to gauge how Johnson would react to the prospect of wielding power. “I think he’s a good number-three man, maybe a number-two man,” Bernard Baruch told Frances Perkins, the labor secretary, in words intended for Roosevelt. “But he’s not a number-one man. He’s dangerous and unstable. He gets nervous and sometimes goes away for days without notice. I’m fond of him, but do tell the President to be careful.”

Roosevelt took Baruch’s warning to heart. Rather than give Johnson control of both agencies created by the National Industrial Recovery Act—the NRA and the Public Works Administration—Roosevelt decided to split responsibility and give the PWA to Harold Ickes at the Interior Department. He casually informed Johnson of the decision at a cabinet meeting. Johnson didn’t handle surprises well, and on this occasion he turned various shades of purple. “I don’t see why,” he spluttered. “I don’t see why.” Roosevelt pretended not to notice and moved on to other business. But as the meeting adjourned, he summoned Frances Perkins. “Stick with Hugh,” he said. “Keep him sweet. Don’t let him explode.” Perkins caught up with Johnson as they left the room. “He’s ruined me,” Johnson muttered.

Yet Roosevelt had measured Johnson accurately. After Perkins drove the general around Washington for a few hours, to calm him down and shield him from reporters, he accepted Roosevelt’s truncated offer. Even so, his inner turmoil surfaced in the comment he made to the press when his appointment became official. “It will be red fire at first and dead cats afterward,” Johnson said. “This is just like mounting the guillotine on the infinitesimal gamble that the ax won’t work.”

Johnson’s tenure went surprisingly well at the start. Or perhaps it wasn’t surprising, in that the contributors to the codes that were the first order of NRA business were desperate for anything that would ease their pain. Johnson’s world was divided into three parts. The NRA recognized industry, labor, and consumers as the keys to recovery; in each sector of the economy, the three groups were convened to contribute to the codes that would govern their behavior and interaction. Johnson started with cotton textiles, in part because of its particularly dire condition, in part because Roosevelt had made it a symbol of cutthroat competition during the campaign, and in part because a group of mill owners had come to Roosevelt asking him to rescue them from themselves. Johnson’s business background gave him a credibility with manufacturers most other New Dealers lacked; mill owners who worried about Roosevelt’s “professors” found Johnson’s straight talk reassuring.

The basic plan for the code making was simple enough. Industry was invited to initiate things by submitting a proposal for a code—that is, for a schedule of production, wages, and prices. This proposal was submitted to representatives of workers and consumers, who would challenge the parts they found unfair or unworkable. With the help of NRA officials expert in that sector—and with timely intervention by Johnson and occasional jawboning by Roosevelt himself—the three groups would hammer out a compromise. The president would sign the code with a flourish, congratulate the parties on work well done, and urge them to carry their spirit of cooperation forward into the implementation of the code.

Textiles fit the pattern perfectly, and within three weeks of the creation of the NRA Roosevelt signed the textile code into law. The president applauded the signatories for their cooperation and good will, and he expressed particular pride that the code abolished child labor in the textile industry. “After years of fruitless effort and discussion, this ancient atrocity went out in a day, because this law permits employers to do by agreement that which none of them could do separately and live in competition.” The textile industry had often been criticized—by Roosevelt, among others—as being the most backward of businesses. Suddenly, with the guidance of government, it vaulted to the forefront of industrial enlightenment, becoming “a leader of a new thing in economics and government.”

HOW NEW THIS “new thing” was sparked vigorous debate. In certain respects the New Deal was structurally conservative, shoring up the capitalist system as the capitalists themselves might have done had they been able. Roosevelt’s rescue of the banks fell into this conservative category; his timely assistance allowed the banks to resume business essentially as they had conducted it before the crisis began.

In other respects, though, the New Deal was structurally radical, and in none more radical than in industrial policy. The NRA entailed a breathtaking extension of federal involvement in the American economy. Never in peacetime—and only once, and temporarily, in war—had Washington taken upon itself the responsibility of organizing industry, of making decisions on hiring, production, distribution, and pricing that heretofore had been left to companies and individuals. Not surprisingly, Roosevelt soft-pedaled the revolutionary nature of what he was attempting. In late July 1933, two weeks after signing the textile code, Roosevelt went on the radio to explain the NRA’s mission and methods. He stressed the spirit of cooperation that had brought capital and labor together, and he called for more of the same. “I am now asking the cooperation that comes from opinion and from conscience,” the president said. Opinion and conscience were the only instruments the government would use in its efforts to revive the economy. “But we shall use them to the limit,” he added significantly, “to protect the willing from the laggard and to make the plan succeed.”

As Roosevelt’s words intimated, the revolution he had in mind was partly structural but equally psychological. The NRA codes would create new institutional relationships among owners, workers, and consumers, but these relationships would be fruitful and durable only if they were accompanied by a change in mindset among the parties to the codes. For decades American capitalism had been premised on competition—on the self-interest Adam Smith had identified as the motive force of the marketplace. Roosevelt was asking the erstwhile competitors to cease their struggle and cooperate. Their aim should not be individual self-interest but the common interest of themselves collectively and of the American people at large.

His model, as he had stated repeatedly, was taken from the nation’s experience during the World War. He cited that model in his radio address, when he introduced an emblem—a blue eagle—that would signify participation in the NRA programs. “In war, in the gloom of night attack, soldiers wear a bright badge on their shoulders to be sure that comrades do not fire on comrades,” he said. The same principle applied now. “We have provided a badge of honor for this purpose, a simple design with a legend, ‘We do our part.’” Roosevelt asserted that Americans could seize their destiny, as they had done during the war. “I have no sympathy with the professional economists who insist that things must run their course and that human agencies can have no influence on economic ills…. But I do have faith, and retain faith, in the strength of the common purpose, and in the strength of unified action taken by the American people.”

EVENTS APPEARED TO confirm Roosevelt’s faith during the rest of the summer. The administration targeted ten industries as essential to economic recovery. Besides textiles, these were coal, oil, steel, autos, lumber, garments, construction, wholesale trade, and retail trade. The last four entailed so many firms of such diverse natures that their codes were put on hold for the time being, in order to focus on the first six. The administration’s success in textiles led Johnson and the codifiers to turn hopefully to coal and the others.

The coal question had vexed the American political economy for decades. In the 1870s industrial terrorists called Molly Maguires had murdered foremen and other representatives of ownership. The owners retaliated by hiring private spies to infiltrate the workers’ communities and turn miner against miner. The pendulum swung in the workers’ favor during the Progressive era, when Theodore Roosevelt took the miners’ side against a particularly arrogant group of owners. The subsequent generation had accomplished little to alleviate the harsh feelings between the two sides, and the onset of the depression simply made matters worse. “There were, on both sides, the scars of bloodshed in old battles,” Johnson remarked, after trying to negotiate a truce. “They recognized the hopelessness of their condition, but there was too much bitter history in the background for them even to confer. They frankly said there was no hope of composition on any national plan.” Nor was the divide between the miners and the owners the only one that mattered. The coal industry included hundreds of small operators who didn’t trust one another and definitely didn’t trust the large concerns. Before Johnson could even approach the unions, he had to persuade the owners to agree on a code proposal.

The annual convention of the coal owners was winding down at Chicago on the day Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act. Johnson seized an army plane for a flight from Washington, having called ahead and urged the owners not to disperse before he could make his pitch. “The plane got away on reports of good weather over the Alleghenies,” Johnson remembered, “and with the aid of a miniature staff we began at once on the plane to try to prepare a presentation to the convention. It was a task so engrossing that nobody even looked out the window for an hour.” When they did, they suddenly lost interest in their paperwork. “My hair rose on end,” Johnson said. “Wet wisps of mist were floating and waving by like washing on a clothes line on a windy day. Just as I raised my eyes, one of these ethereal union-suits flapped its legs up and disclosed that we were headed into a mountain not a hundred yards away, with no sight of its top and no idea of what lay on left, right, or bottom.” The plane had lost radio contact with the ground and had wandered off course. The pilot couldn’t tell where they were or which way to go. Fuel was running low by the time they identified Johnstown (in part by the persisting evidence of the great flood of 1889), forty miles off course. They reached Pittsburgh on empty tanks, grateful to be back on terra firma but more anxious than ever—now that the imminent peril to life and limb had passed—to keep the coal men from leaving Chicago. Johnson drove to a Pittsburgh radio station, which fashioned a link to the convention hall in Chicago. But the effort failed. His impromptu message was garbled and incoherent, and the meeting broke up with the owners no closer to cooperation.

Yet Johnson persisted. He managed to get enough of the owners to sit down with the union leaders to create a passable quorum, and he let them air their ancient grievances. He mostly avoided taking sides, but when one party or the other seemed stuck on an emotional point he employed certain phrases he had learned from army mule skinners in the Mexican campaign. “You do not get a dozen warring districts which have never known peace in our lifetime, and the labor in all these districts, together with each other and with their employees to agree for the first time in history by suavity and slickness or by reading economic lectures by a professor,” he explained after the fact.

Johnson kept Roosevelt apprised of the progress of the talks, but the president avoided direct involvement. Feelings were certain to be bruised before the code took final shape, and Roosevelt wanted to be sure that the injured blamed Johnson and not him. Reporters asked how a particular phase of the talks had gone; Roosevelt replied: “It must have been amusing—this is strictly off the record. Apparently Johnson got Pinchot”—Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation mentor and currently governor of Pennsylvania—“in one hotel, and Lewis”—John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers—“in another, and locked them in. And he got the vice president of the Steel Corporation”—U.S. Steel, which controlled huge coal fields in addition to being the biggest steel company in the world—“in a third hotel, and locked him in and kept them all there. And, at the psychological moment, he would bring two out and get them together, and then the other two, and get them together, and work them around. Hugh Johnson has done a swell job on this.”

JOHNSON’S EVENTUAL success with the coal men—“a pretty tough baby,” he called the coal code at the signing ceremony—might have been expected to serve as a precedent for other major codes. Roosevelt hoped it would, and to some extent it did. But each industry had its own history, problems, and grievances. The American oil industry was particularly troubled, and never more than during the 1930s. The first American oil boom had occurred in western Pennsylvania after Edwin Drake struck the slippery stuff near Titusville in 1859. The black-gold rush that followed was brought under comparative control only when John D. Rockefeller perfected his Standard Oil monopoly in the 1870s. A second boom developed in Texas and along the Gulf Coast after the 1901 blow-in at Spindletop, near Beaumont. This surge rose higher than the first, driving and being driven by the technological shift from steam power to internal combustion.

The third oil boom burst forth amid the Great Depression. Drillers in East Texas struck oil a year after the stock market crash, and during the next several months they and the thousands who raced to the region to exploit the find ascertained that this field dwarfed anything discovered in America previously. But far from being a bonanza, the East Texas boom nearly destroyed the American oil industry. The oil flooded the market and caused prices to collapse, making oil, at times, cheaper than water in the oil regions. Simple capitalist competition explained some of the overproduction, but the rest resulted from the peculiarities of geology and of petroleum law. An oil field can be likened to an oversized ice cream soda with many straws and sippers. The more that goes out one straw, the less there is for everyone else. And the “rule of capture,” a common-law principle that dated from the Saxon days in England, where it applied to water rights, and that had been applied to oil law by the Supreme Court in the 1880s, awarded ownership to whoever pumped the oil from the ground, regardless of where that oil originated. The resulting overproduction not only ravaged prices in the short term but threatened the long-term productivity of the fields, in that too rapid depletion could disrupt the fluid mechanisms that caused the oil to flow in the first place.

The situation was one that cried out for the guiding hand of government. The Texas Railroad Commission made a start, having inherited—or seized, depending on one’s point of view—responsibility over oil in the state during the days when oil typically traveled by rail. The railroad commission contrived to ration production among the various leaseholders and nudge prices upward. Yet the arrangement was tenuous, despite Governor Ross Sterling’s dispatch of the Texas national guard and the Texas Rangers to the oil fields to catch and punish cheaters, and the oil men looked to Washington for additional help just as the NRA’s Blue Eagle was being hatched.

Compared with textiles, an industry with hundreds of products, and coal, with its long history of murderous labor relations, the oil business was straightforward; the essence of any code would be caps on production. Yet these would have to be flexible, given the volatility of demand, both foreign and domestic, for oil. The solution, embodied in the NRA code established during the summer of 1933, was for the secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, to act as national oil director, each month apportioning production among the several oil states. In his first order, issued in early September, Ickes mandated that the country’s production be slashed by 300,000 barrels. This order overturned not merely the market mechanisms of capitalism as they applied to oil but also the Supreme Court decision grafting the rule of capture onto the oil industry.

The oil men weren’t accustomed to such decisiveness from Washington. Some resisted, contending that the government ought to guarantee prices rather than restrict output. “If you do not give us price regulations,” an official of Standard Oil of California declared, “you can make codes from now to doomsday and you will get nowhere.” But others were grateful for anything that might save the industry from itself. When prices, which had fallen to four cents a barrel in East Texas that spring, began climbing toward the glorious figure of a dollar, they looked upon Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal with a fondness they never would have anticipated only a few years before.

THE AUTO CODE suffered from a boycott by Henry Ford. Thirty years earlier, Ford had been a populist hero, building cars for the masses. Ten years after that, he had been the most enlightened of employers, paying his employees five dollars a day at a time when the industry standard was scarcely half as much and putting the American economy on the high-wage, high-productivity path that buried forever—or at least until the Great Depression set in—Karl Marx’s prediction about the inevitable immiseration of the working class.

But time and the automobile industry had passed Ford by. Other companies caught on to the secrets of the assembly line, and his Model T looked increasingly stodgy beside the sleek new models put out each year by General Motors. Ford himself grew cranky. His Dearborn Independentblamed international Jewry for the problems that afflicted the planet, and he began to see enemies everywhere. He planted spies in his own factories to forestall unionization, and he loudly proclaimed his right to run his company on his terms.

Not surprisingly, this attitude didn’t lend itself to the cooperation the NRA codes required. Hugh Johnson had worked with Ford during the war and had found him as public-spirited as any industrialist. Johnson hoped Ford might be brought around again. But he recognized Ford’s touchiness, and so he approached the old man, who turned seventy that summer, carefully and surreptitiously. He left his Washington office after work one day, boarded the fastest plane in the army’s air force, arrived in Dearborn, spoke with Ford for a few hours, and returned to Washington to be at his desk when the office opened the next morning. None but those actually involved knew anything about the meeting.

Johnson believed things had gone well with Ford. “I thought that he said that he would support what I was doing to the limit and even beyond,” Johnson recalled. Ford Motor representatives joined the negotiations on the automobile code and seemed as amenable to a coordinated policy as the representatives from General Motors and the other companies. But at the last minute they pulled out, obviously on orders from Ford himself.

Johnson flew to Michigan once more. This time he talked to Ford’s son, Edsel, who seemed upset about the whole affair. He wanted to help but couldn’t get around his father’s phobia about unions. He told Johnson that Ford Motor would sign the code if the government could assure the company that it wouldn’t have to recognize the auto workers’ union. Because this was an essential part of the pact, and in keeping with one of the premises of the New Deal, Johnson rejected the offer.

Johnson thereupon applied the kind of moral pressure that was supposed to be a hallmark of the NRA. Ford’s refusal to join the auto code was a matter of public record, even if Johnson’s conversations with the company’s principals were not. A reporter approached Johnson regarding what the NRA intended to do about Ford. “General,” the newsman asked, “how long will Ford have before you take steps?”

“I do not know,” Johnson said—neither confirming nor denying that he was considering steps.

“Before you crack down on him?” the reporter pressed. “Will you crack down on him?”

“I think maybe the American people will crack down on him when the Blue Eagle is on other cars and he does not have one.”

“In other words, you will not give it to him if he does not sign?”

“Of course not.”

Johnson and Roosevelt generally spoke and acted as though compliance with the NRA were voluntary. This wasn’t entirely true, as Johnson’s implicit appeal to American consumers to boycott Ford revealed. And the administration’s leverage went further than that. Another reporter asked if government agencies would divest themselves of the Fords and Lincolns in their auto fleets. Johnson said they would not. “There would be no point in getting rid of those that they have,” he said, before adding significantly: “But they won’t get any more. The government has signified its intentions of buying only from those industries which display the Blue Eagle.”

Reporters asked Roosevelt at the president’s next press conference whether Johnson’s position reflected that of the White House. Would the administration countenance a boycott against Ford? Roosevelt didn’t want to pick a fight with Ford or to be seen as taking sides in a code dispute. He selected his words with care. “I don’t think he has put it quite that way,” Roosevelt replied. “I think he put it entirely in the negative way instead of the positive way. In other words, raising the question as to whether—not any suggestion from topside of a boycott, but as to whether people actually would, of their own volition, buy a car that did not have NRA on it. That is a very different thing.”

“Just a suggestion?”

“No, not a suggestion. It is just asking a hypothetical question.”

It wasn’t hypothetical at all. Johnson had raised the issue of a consumer boycott, and though Roosevelt danced around it, he enforced Johnson’s threat to halt purchases of Ford products. After the auto code took effect among the other manufacturers, and among auto dealers across the country, Ford continued to resist Johnson’s effort to get him to join. A reporter queried Roosevelt: “Can you tell us anything about that controversy?”

“I have not had any part in it at all, except what I read,” the president answered. But Congress had banned government purchase of noncompliant products, and he was bound to enforce the law. “We have got to eliminate the purchase of Ford cars,” Roosevelt said.

AS BOLD AS the NRA was in conception, it was more audacious in action. By the autumn of 1933 the major codes were in place and the principal industries were adjusting to their demands. The Blue Eagle was the symbol of the new regime of planned and guided capitalism, and Hugh Johnson was its embodiment. On his good days Johnson reveled in the authority, even as he maintained sufficient savvy to deny he wielded it. “I want to avoid even the smallest semblance of czarism,” he asserted. “It is industrial self-government I am interested in. The function of this act”—the Recovery Act—“is not to run out and control an industry, but for that industry to come to this table and offer its ideas as to what it thinks should be done.” Johnson contrasted the NRA to its farming counterpart, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, at least as he perceived the two agencies. “AAA thinks that government should run business. NRA thinks that business should run itself under government supervision.”

Johnson provided that supervision, and considerable moral support as well. Johnson launched the Blue Eagle with all the propaganda resources of the federal government. In press releases, pamphlets, fliers, newspaper columns, and radio broadcasts, he summoned the American people to the great struggle of their generation. He targeted women particularly. “Women do 80 percent of our buying,” he told an audience in St. Louis. “It is they who can put the Blue Eagle on everything that moves in trade or commerce…. When every American housewife understands that the Blue Eagle on everything that she permits to come into her home is a symbol of its restoration to security, may God have mercy on the man or group of men who attempt to trifle with this bird.” Johnson followed the president’s lead in likening the current crisis to war, and he cited some precedents of his own. “Those who are not with us are against us,” he said. “And the way to show that you are a part of this great army of the New Deal is to insist on this symbol of solidarity exactly as Peter of the Keys drew a fish on the sand as a countersign, and Peter the Hermit exacted the cross on the baldric of every good man and true.” Johnson entreated Americans to purchase products and services bearing the Blue Eagle and to purchase them in quantities not seen for years. He acknowledged the counterintuitive character of this recommendation; in hard times the prudent householder normally kept the purse strings tight. Such an approach might have made sense when the economy was in free fall, but now it would be fatal to the nation’s recovery. “Unpainted houses, cracked shoes many times half-soled, shiny pants, rattling automobiles, dyed dresses, refurbished wardrobes—all these badges of unselfish husbandry must now be replaced if this plan is to have a fair chance to do what we hope for it,” Johnson said. “We must shake ourselves out of this four-year-old idea of doing without against a rainy day, and we must do that overnight…. Buy! Buy now! Buy within prudence everything you need and have so long denied yourselves. It is the key to the whole situation.”

In the spirit of a wartime rally—or perhaps one of Peter the Hermit’s religious crusades—Johnson organized a Blue Eagle parade in New York City. For weeks Johnson’s subordinates at the NRA negotiated with city officials, securing permits, enlisting law enforcement, ensuring access and egress for emergency vehicles, and publicizing the event to all within commuting distance of Manhattan. Pledge lists were circulated; over a million consumers in the city promised to patronize only businesses that flew the Blue Eagle. On the day of the parade the army of the Blue Eagle swamped the New York transit system. “Swollen by streams of passengers from every transit line in the city, a vast lake of humanity overflowed the grass plots and concrete plazas of Washington Square yesterday, and broke in a white surf of banners against the encircling hotels and housefronts,” an eyewitness asserted. “They were dressmakers, mechanics, office boys, clerks, and chorus girls—workers all of them, ready to hike four miles for the President and the NRA.” The parade had been scheduled to start at half past one; it got off late when the crush of participants prevented Johnson and the other distinguished guests from reaching the start on time. But then away they went. “Neatly canalized, the lake became a broad river of humanity flowing between human dikes,” a journalist recorded. “The crowds lining the streets pressed forward for a better view, patrolmen grew red in the face, and the horses of mounted policemen pranced dangerously near the toes of onlookers.” The throng was widely accounted to be the largest in the history of New York, numbering upwards of a quarter million.

Johnson stood for hours on a reviewing stand; as the marchers went by he recognized familiar faces and was tempted to wave. But seeing the massed cameras on the street below the stand, calculating the angle at which they would take their pictures, and realizing that any careless gesture would be interpreted by NRA critics as a Fascist salute, he generally nodded and kept his arm low. His caution failed. Time ran a picture showing an arm protruding Mussolini-like from Johnson’s shoulder. “But it wasn’t my arm on that photograph,” Johnson complained afterward. Maybe not. Yet Johnson’s explanation sounded even more implausible. “I think it was the arm of Mayor O’Brien, who stood beside me, which had been faked onto my body.”

The New York Times, which had been skeptical of much relating to Roosevelt’s program, offered a mixed review of the day’s events. “There have been more brilliant processions,” the editors asserted.

This one had little color or variety. It was for the most part a monotony of the commonplace. But it had all the more promise for that. It was democracy’s answer out of its daily life to the challenge of the years of depression. The resolute feet that went marching on till midnight were indicative of the spirit—employers and employees marching side by side. But it is the days after that will count, when one has to march alone without the visible association of others in the same effort.

ROOSEVELT DIDN’T attend the Blue Eagle rally, leaving the Mussolini comparisons to Johnson. But he did some public relations work of his own. At a press conference the day of the rally, he conducted an impromptu seminar in economics for the reporters. Johnson had been saying that the NRA had accomplished 25 percent of its program; the correspondents wanted to know if the president agreed with this assessment. Roosevelt didn’t wish to differ with his NRA chief publicly, but neither did he intend to raise unrealistic expectations. “This is off the record,” he said. “Perhaps those figures are true—I don’t know, so far as putting people back to work goes…. This program is part of a very big project we are engaged in. We can’t accomplish it in six months or even a year…. But we are making very definite progress.” Roosevelt apologized for not having hard figures, which were difficult to come by on certain key aspects of the economy. Yet he reiterated that things were moving in the right direction, if slowly, all across the board. “Wheat isn’t high enough, cotton isn’t high enough. There aren’t nearly enough people back at work. But they are going back, and we hope that as time goes on, week after week, we are going to have not only more people back at work, but we are going to have higher farm prices.”

The president did have some figures that bolstered his claim to overall improvement. Current estimates from the Department of Agriculture placed 1933 gross farm income at $6.1 billion, up from $5.1 billion in 1932. This was a big increase, although more work remained. The dream of farmers was the price level that had prevailed before the World War. Whether or not Roosevelt considered a return to this level realistic, he typically spoke as though he did. “If we take the prewar level of 100—this is actual farm prices—they were down to 50 in March of this year,” he explained. “And they are back now to about 66²/3. In other words, they have gone about a third of the way back.” Administration policy aimed to continue to close the gap.

The White House seminar continued three days later. The Blue Eagle parade had put the NRA on the front pages of all the papers, and the reporters had numerous questions for Roosevelt. One involved the Labor Department’s cost of living index, on which various wage codes were based. Some people judged it out of date; what did the president think?

Roosevelt agreed. “I have been dissatisfied with the index that they have been using right along,” he said. The Labor Department was working on changing it. “For example, one of the items that they figure on in fixing up this cost index is high-buttoned ladies’ shoes. I am told by the girls that they don’t make them any more. What they are trying to do in the Department of Labor is to get the index to represent more nearly the things the average family has to buy to live on.”

Another question involved section 7a of the Recovery Act, governing the rights of labor. The language of the section was broadly favorable to workers but vague:

Employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing…. No employee and no one seeking employment shall be required as a condition of employment to join any company union or to refrain from joining, organizing, or assisting a labor organization of his own choosing…. Employers shall comply with the maximum hours of labor, minimum rates of pay, and other conditions of employment, approved or prescribed by the President.

Yet the act specified no sanctions in the event employers violated its provisions, and it left considerable room for interpretation. Management was interpreting it narrowly, labor broadly. “Do you want to say anything on that?” a reporter asked Roosevelt.

“I suppose I will have to, but will have to do it off the record,” the president replied. He knew he couldn’t dodge the issue entirely, but the vagueness of section 7a had been deliberate and he didn’t want to commit himself to anything before he absolutely had to. “I read it over last night,” he said of the section. “It looks pretty clear.” But he declined to expound that clarity, preferring obfuscation instead. “It provides for collective bargaining when you come to the necessary interpretation of it. That interpretation should arise from, or be caused by, some specific case. And then you would have to interpret that specific case in the light of Article 7a, instead of putting down a hypothetical interpretation which again would have to be interpreted in the light of a given case.”

The reporters weren’t satisfied with this runaround. They pushed Roosevelt to say something more concrete.

“There are a great many interpretations which people have tried to make, and no two ever agree on the actual interpretation of the language,” he said, as unhelpfully as before. “So I am standing on 7a.”

Could they put that on the record?, the reporters asked.

“I tell you what—suppose you put it this way, as background: that the White House feels that Article 7a is very plain English and that the interpretation of Article 7a will come about when specific cases arise requiring an interpretation, and until such cases arise it doesn’t seem advisable to the president that people should make hypothetical interpretations. Let it go at that.”

JOHN L. LEWIS had his own interpretation of section 7a. Lewis was two years older than Roosevelt, having been born in Iowa in 1880; somewhat shorter, though with an even larger, more impressive head; substantially heavier, as befit a man who represented the brawn of the laboring classes; equally willing to illustrate a point with an anecdote, often embellished and dramatically acted out; better read, or at least more likely to season his stories with Shakespeare and allusions to Eastern mythology; no less charismatic, both up close and before crowds; and wholly as pleased with himself when the center of attention. “He who tooteth not his own horn,” Lewis often said, typically between toots, “the same shall not be tooted.”

Lewis inherited the mining instinct from his Welsh mining forebears, and he worked the coal mines of the Ohio Valley till he was thirty. He enlisted in the United Mine Workers and rose to become president of the union about the time Warren Harding became president of the United States. Harding and his Republican successors weren’t friendly to organized labor, and in the shakeout from the wartime boom, the miners were hit by the falling rubble. The onset of the depression compounded their woes; by 1933 the ranks of the UMW had dwindled to 100,000, from 400,000 in 1920.

Through most of that period, Lewis retained the fundamental faith in capitalism that long distinguished the labor movement in America from its counterparts in Europe. He expected and desired that workers remain workers and owners owners. He voted Republican right through the election of 1932. But when Roosevelt defeated Hoover and when the New Deal promised to make life better for organized labor, he discovered merit in the Roosevelt approach. He roundly applauded the National Industrial Recovery Act, especially section 7a. “From the standpoint of human welfare and economic freedom,” he said, “we are convinced that there has been no legal instrument comparable with it since President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.” Lewis yielded nothing to Roosevelt or Hugh Johnson in propaganda prowess; the UMW at once launched an organizing campaign that appealed to the same patriotic emotions as the Blue Eagle parades and rallies. “The President wants you to unionize!” spokesmen for the UMW told miners across the coal belt. “It is unpatriotic to refuse to unionize. Here is your union. Never mind about the dues now. Just join up!” A broadside that circulated among the hills of Kentucky put the matter forcefully: “The United States Government has said LABOR MUST ORGANIZE…. Forget about injunctions, yellow dog contracts, black lists, and fear of dismissal. The employers cannot and will not dare to go to the Government for privileges if it can be shown that they have denied the right of organization to their employees. ALL WORKERS ARE FULLY PROTECTED IF THEY DESIRE TO JOIN A UNION.”

Lewis took this attitude to the negotiations over the coal code. Patrick Hurley, the Republican secretary of war responsible for the orders that sent Douglas MacArthur against the Bonus Army in 1932, represented some of the mine operators. Hurley’s heartland upbringing matched Lewis’s; he proudly expatiated on his boyhood in Indian Territory and his hardscrabble youth on the frontier. He added, for Lewis’s benefit, that he had once worked in the mines and had carried the union card of the UMW. Lewis watched Hurley carefully from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. He raised himself to his full height, threw his head back, and declaimed what seemed to be congratulations. “It is a matter of pride to a member of the United Mine Workers to see a man of that organization go out into the highways and byways of national politics and make a name for himself that is recognized throughout the country,” Lewis said. His gaze turned to a glare as he continued: “But it is a matter of sorrow and regret to see a man betray the union of his youth”—and Lewis here brought Hurley’s fellow management representatives into his frowning view—“for thirty lousy pieces of silver.” Hurley leaped to his feet and rushed toward Lewis, angrily insisting that he retract the slander he had just uttered. Lewis stood fast, as though to let Hurley’s outburst break upon his rugged form. In a calm voice he told the chair of the meeting: “Strike out ‘thirty pieces of silver.’ Let it stand: ‘betray the union of his youth.’”

The coal operators—and other employers—were forced to accept the language of section 7a and to see its principles written into the industrial codes. But they weren’t without recourse. Despite its apparent curbs on company unions, many employers turned to just such alternative organizations and encouraged workers to join them. Some of the enticements were illusory, but others were real: higher wages, broader benefits, better working conditions. To workers accustomed to little but hostility from management, the company unions marked a signal improvement.

This was precisely what bothered Lewis, William Green of the American Federation of Labor, and other labor leaders. The company unions gave workers something, but not nearly what Lewis and Green thought the workers ought to receive and what they thought the workers would get under independent unions like the UMW and those affiliated with the AFL. In the several months following passage of the Recovery Act, company unions sprang up by the hundreds. The independent unions naturally complained, and many launched strikes to preempt the company unions, to resist their spread, or to register disapproval of the whole scheme. Meanwhile they appealed to the Roosevelt administration and to Congress to strengthen the guarantees they believed section 7a had accorded them.

THE NRA WAS the most radical and potentially the most important of the New Deal programs, but the Civilian Conservation Corps was the closest to Roosevelt’s heart. It was also the one that promised to have the most immediate impact on the unemployment rate in America, a fact that intensified his affection for it. The stated goal of the CCC was to put a quarter million men to work within a few months; nothing so ambitious had ever been attempted by government in America. The nearest parallels were the raising of armies for war, which accounted for Roosevelt’s decision to enlist the War Department, despite early opposition from the military brass. The officers complained that their line was warfare, not social work. But when the commander in chief insisted, and when Congress supplied the money to ensure that the civilian corps did not steal resources from the military corps, the army came around.

Besides the War Department, Roosevelt recruited the Departments of Interior and Agriculture to construct the camps and supervise the projects the men would undertake. Meanwhile he kept a close eye on the whole affair. “I want personally to check on the location and scope of the camps, assign work to be done, etc.,” he wrote on an organizational chart he devised for the corps. This was a bad idea, as soon became apparent. Amid the myriad other demands on his time, Roosevelt couldn’t keep up with the creation of the hundreds, then thousands, of CCC camps. At first the corps’ director, Robert Fechner, humored Roosevelt and sent the president each request. But after the backlog at the White House started crimping the work on the ground, Fechner exercised greater authority of his own.

Neither Fechner nor Roosevelt—nor anyone else, for that matter—realized what the government was getting into with the CCC. The head of Agriculture’s Forest Service bravely promised to build the requisite camps—some thirteen hundred in the first wave—by midsummer, only to discover that his agency had nowhere near the requisite administrative and logistic capacity. Reluctantly he and Fechner leaned more heavily on the army, which, even more reluctantly, shouldered a larger share of the burden. The target population of the corps was unemployed young males from the cities, but they were soon supplemented by some twenty thousand “local experienced men”—lumberjacks, hunting guides, and the like. Dual necessity inspired this expansion: city boys who didn’t know a penknife from a Pulaski would have been lost, literally and figuratively, in the forests, and the loggers and guides would have been angry at being excluded from work they were particularly competent to do. “It is clearly impossible to import into forest regions non-residents even from within the same state, and have peace there unless local unemployed laborers, accustomed to making their living in the woods in that very place, are given fair consideration as concerns their own means of livelihood,” a letter to Roosevelt from Fechner and other interested parties asserted. The loggers, in particular, were a rough bunch. Should they be excluded they might burn down the camps or the forests or both.

Considerations of a slightly different sort caused Roosevelt to expand the purview of the corps to include American Indians. Poverty had been a severe problem on reservations and in the surrounding regions since the nineteenth century, and the drought that afflicted large swaths of the Plains deepened the misery. The drought simultaneously aggravated erosion, making the reservation districts suitable for the kind of restorative work that was part of the corps’ raison d’être. The requisite changes were made in the recruitment schedules, and nearly fifteen thousand Indians were added to the ranks of the conservationist workforce.

Another contingent came from the Bonus Army. Eleanor Roosevelt had charmed the veterans personally, but what disbanded the group definitively was the promise of inclusion in the conservation corps. This required some stretching of the corps mandate, as most of the vets were beyond the age limit of twenty-five years, and many were married, also in contravention of CCC practice. But smart politics and simple justice suggested that exceptions were in order, and Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the enlistment of twenty-five thousand vets. Some grumbled that the thirty-dollar monthly wage wasn’t what they had hoped for. But considering their alternatives, many judged the offer a bargain and donned the uniform of the CCC.

The vets found much about corps life familiar. Work days began with six o’clock reveille. The young men turned out of their cots in the tents that served as initial shelter, arranged in neat rows along paths lined with gravel. A first order of business in most camps was building wooden barracks to replace the tents; thereafter the men slept in bunks. A cold shower or splash constituted the morning ablutions, which were followed by a half hour’s calisthenics and other exercise. (Whether Roosevelt, in personally approving this part of the program, grew wistful at thoughts of Walter Camp’s wartime regimen is impossible to know.) Breakfast was served at seven and consisted of lumber-camp fare in substantial, if not Paul Bunyan-esque, proportions. Ham and eggs, hot cereal and stewed prunes, milk and coffee fueled the bodies for the morning’s work in the woods.

Roll call and inspection followed breakfast, and by eight the men were off to the job sites. If these were close to camp, they hefted their tools and walked; if farther, they piled into trucks and were driven. They cleared brush, built trails, and planted trees—hundreds of trees, thousands of trees, eventually millions of trees. At noon they broke for lunch, which was delivered to the site if they weren’t within walking distance of the mess hall. In the hall the meal was often hot; in the woods it typically consisted of sandwiches, more coffee, and pie. Work resumed and lasted till four, when the men returned to the camp. The hour before dinner was their own, to read any mail that might have come, write letters, play baseball or football, or do whatever else young men do in the absence of young women and alcohol. Some camps had libraries stocked with magazines and popular books; mobile libraries served those camps without fixed facilities.

All day the men wore work clothes, typically denim jeans and work shirts. For dinner they donned dress uniforms: olive drab supplied by the army. Eventually Roosevelt designed a dress uniform specifically for the CCC: forest green shirts and slacks. Dinner was even heartier than breakfast or lunch; the men downed beefsteaks, potatoes, bread, vegetables, fruit, milk, coffee, cake, and pie. An early measure of the success of the program was the muscle and bone the young men added to their frames. According to CCC statistics, the average enrollee arrived weighing 147 pounds and standing 5 feet 8¹/4 inches tall, at twenty years of age. This was below the norm for healthy, well-fed young men of that era, and it reflected the poverty most of the enrollees had experienced during adolescence. Within a month or two, the typical corpsman had put on ten or twelve pounds; many added height as well, though this naturally took longer.

Roosevelt remarked on the healthy growth when he toured CCC camps in August 1933. The president traversed the Shenandoah Valley west of Washington, stopping at five camps below the Blue Ridge. Someone in the corps had suggested that Roosevelt visit a model camp; he vetoed this plan in favor of examining several examples of the real thing. The five camps were a fair cross-section of the CCC in action. Each camp contained about two hundred men. Some of the camps were on public property; others were on private land. The men were clearing downed trees and dead wood, as a precaution against fire, and extending trails and improving roads. They were most proud of the stone guard walls they had built along the Blue Ridge Skyline Drive, where the pavement ran dangerously close to sheer cliffs.

Roosevelt rode in an open car beneath the hot Virginia sun. As he arrived at each camp, the men lined up in their army dress for inspection. They remained at attention till he gave the nod to their commander, who told them to break ranks—at which point they mobbed the president’s car to shake his hand. At one camp he ate lunch, attacking his fried steak, mashed potatoes, string beans, lettuce-and-tomato salad, and apple cobbler, washed down with iced tea, with almost as much gusto as the men did. “I wish I could spend a couple of months here myself,” he declared. “The only difference between us is that I am told you men have put on an average of twelve pounds each. I am trying to lose twelve pounds.” At another camp a self-proclaimed “Hillbilly Band” serenaded the president with “Turkey in the Straw.” At a third camp the corpsmen built a bonfire and burned an effigy of “Old Man Depression.”

For Roosevelt, the mission of the conservation corps had as much to do with conserving human resources as with saving America’s forests. He concluded his tour of the Virginia camps with the comment that he hoped the CCC camps all over the country were as inspiring as these. “All you have to do is look at the boys themselves to see that the camps are a success,” he said.

29.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT VISITED CCC CAMPS, TOO, BUT USUALLY WITHOUT her husband. She spent few days with Franklin—and of course no nights. She filled her calendar with her own activities, her own causes, her own companions. Being First Lady could sometimes be exciting. Amelia Earhart came to Washington and took Eleanor flying. “It was like being on top of the world!” Eleanor exclaimed. Being First Lady could also be a chore. She naturally hired a housekeeper to run the executive mansion; Henrietta Nesbitt received the job because Eleanor knew and liked her from Hyde Park, where she had operated a small tea house. The appointment was a disaster. The meals at the White House became notorious for the terrible food: leathery meat, watery soup, unrecognizable vegetables, cheap wine. Guests shared horror stories; Franklin complained. But Eleanor professed not to notice, and Mrs. Nesbitt stayed on. Certain of those who knew of the personal tension between Eleanor and Franklin surmised that Mrs. Nesbitt was, in a subtle and perhaps unconscious way, Eleanor’s instrument for asserting control over her husband in one area of their relationship where she could.

More commonly she simply struck out on her own. She continued her press conferences and began speaking on the radio. Her six-minute weekly broadcasts weren’t publicized as a counterpart to Franklin’s Fireside Chats, nor did she intend them as such. But inevitably some observers interpreted them that way. Eleanor’s broadcasts clearly differed from Franklin’s in one crucial respect: she was paid for them. The three-thousand-dollar weekly fee struck many people, including Eleanor, as exorbitant. “No one is worth $500 a minute,” she admitted. But the fee was what the sponsor, the Johns-Manville corporation, a manufacturer of building materials, was willing to pay, and Eleanor arranged for the funds to be transferred to the American Friends Service Committee. She wrote a monthly column for Woman’s Home Companion, for which she received a thousand dollars per month. She tried, in her radio broadcasts and her column, to avoid topics that might embarrass Franklin. She skirted politics, at least at first, and concentrated on matters of domestic and maternal interest.

She traveled frequently, often in the company of Lorena Hickok, the reporter from the 1932 campaign. Hick, as she was called, had had to fight her way into the male preserve of political reporting. She swapped lewd stories with the boys on the beat and shared the booze that eased the boredom of waiting for news to break. She covered the Lindbergh kidnapping case for the Associated Press, crawling through snowdrifts around the Lindbergh house in response to a rumor that the baby had been retrieved. The AP put her on to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932, an assignment that cost Hickok her objectivity and eventually—after her editor learned that she was letting Eleanor read her stories before she filed them—her job. Eleanor thereupon found her a position with Harry Hopkins, who headed the administration’s relief program. Yet she made time to travel with Eleanor, and the two became close friends.

Eleanor usually traveled in her official role as First Lady, giving the requisite interviews and speeches. Occasionally, though, she tried to retrieve the private life she had enjoyed before her husband became so famous. In the summer of 1933 she and Hick took a road trip to Quebec and around the Gaspé Peninsula. She left the Secret Service at home, to the agents’ displeasure. “They predicted that we’d be kidnapped,” Hickok remembered. The abduction and killing of the Lindbergh baby had shocked the nation the year before, and law enforcement was on high alert. Hickok and Eleanor laughed. “The idea of anyone trying to kidnap two women, one nearly six feet tall”—Eleanor—“and the other weighing close to two hundred pounds”—Hickok—“seemed funny,” Hickok said. Eleanor chuckled: “Where would they hide us? They certainly couldn’t cram us into the trunk of a car!” The trip went well and inconspicuously. Eleanor wasn’t as recognizable as she would become, and to many of the people they encountered they were simply two women on a holiday. Others apparently recognized Eleanor but left her alone. “They’re all Republicans up here,” she explained to Hickok in New Hampshire.

Subsequent vacations were less satisfactory. Franklin Roosevelt declared 1934 to be “National Parks Year,” and Eleanor decided to tour the West with Hickok. At Yosemite she insisted that they ride horses among the mountain peaks; she found the experience exhilarating, but Hickok, who avoided exercise whenever possible, gasped and strained at the altitude and the effort. “How could you do this to me?” Hickok complained. “You’ll manage,” Eleanor responded.

Hickok recuperated on the drive from Yosemite to San Francisco, where she had arranged for them to stay in a small, previously quiet hotel. The owner was surprised to learn that the second member of Hickok’s party was the president’s wife, yet he maintained his aplomb and their secret. One member of the hotel staff, however, was less discreet, and when the women returned from dinner the lobby was overflowing with reporters. Flashbulbs popped; questions were shouted at Eleanor. She refused to answer, beyond declaring, “I’m here on a vacation. I’d like to be left alone.” But San Francisco was ruined for them. Reporters and photographers followed them all around the city the next day. They had intended to remain longer but decided to leave at once.

They drove north into Oregon, stopping at Bend, a small town on the east side of the Cascades. The news of their approach had preceded them, and the manager of their hotel said some people wanted to meet them. Eleanor begged off. “We’re tired,” she said. “We have to leave very early tomorrow morning.” Dinner was quiet, and the two watched the sun set over the snow-capped mountains. But as they exited the dining room they encountered a large crowd, headed by the mayor. Eleanor sent Hickok along and, as politely as possible, shook the required hands.

Half an hour later she extricated herself. She went upstairs and slammed the door—“something I’d never known her to do before, nor did I ever know her to do it since that night,” Hickok remembered. Eleanor sat down on the bed.

On either cheek was a red spot. They used to appear that way when she was annoyed.

“Franklin was right!” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

“Franklin said I’d never get away with it,” she replied. “And I can’t.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she sighed and added: “From now on I shall travel as I’m supposed to travel, as the President’s wife, and try to do what is expected of me.” Then she added defiantly: “But there’s one thing I will not do. I will not have a Secret Service man following me about. Never!”

If the western trip failed as a getaway, it confirmed the bond between Eleanor and Hickok. Eleanor remained attached to Franklin by complex ties of affection, obligation, and ambition, but deeper emotions gradually connected her to Hick. “I’ve been wondering what I really want for my declining years,” she wrote Hick in the spring of 1934. She had attended a conference on aging and the problems old people in America sometimes confronted. “I hope you and I together have enough to make it gracious and attractive.” She reflected on the future, and her thoughts included Hick more often than they did Franklin. “Someday we’ll lead a leisurely life and write—so we can take our work with us and do all the things we want to do.”

Hickok had difficulty waiting. “And now I am going to bed—to try to dream about you,” she wrote when they were apart. She counted the moments till they would be together again.

Only 8 more days. 24 hours from now it will be only 7 more—just a week. I’ve been trying to bring back your face to remember just how you look! Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips.

Eleanor reciprocated. She told Hick how she had been helping some friends set up a house and had fallen asleep beside one of them in a big double bed. “Only I wished it was you,” she wrote. She regularly reassured Hick, who often seemed the needier of the two emotionally. “Love is a queer thing,” Eleanor wrote. “It hurts one but it gives one so much more in return!” She, too, wished for their separation to end. “Someday we will do lots of work together! I love you deeply, tenderly and my arms feel very empty.”

HUEY LONG’S AMBITIONS as a young man weren’t much different from Franklin Roosevelt’s. He told the woman he would marry that he intended to enter politics at the state level, advance to governor, then run for national office, eventually president. That such ambitions seemed natural for Roosevelt, a scion of the New York gentry, but excessive for Long, a child of back-country Louisiana, accounted for much of Long’s resentment against Roosevelt.

Until the 1920s Long’s ambitions and resentments remained hidden from most of the country. He made a minor stir by attacking Standard Oil from his seat on the Louisiana commission that regulated the petroleum industry in the state, and he ran third for governor in 1924. But he learned from his defeat and in 1928, even as Roosevelt was squeaking to victory in the race for New York governor, Long barged into the governor’s house in Baton Rouge by the largest margin in Louisiana history. His politics were populist; his slogan—“Every man a king, but no one wears a crown”—was borrowed from William Jennings Bryan. Yet Long was no Bryan. The essential sweetness that even Bryan’s opponents noted in the Nebraskan was utterly missing in the Kingfish, as he called himself. The journalist A. J. Liebling said that Long’s complexion was “the color of a sunburn coming on” in truth it wasn’t sunburn so much as indignation, on behalf of himself and those he professed to speak for. Long toured the Cajun districts of his state and doffed his hat beneath the boughs of the Evangeline Oak. “It is here under this oak where Evangeline waited for her lover, Gabriel, who never came,” he said to the dirt farmers gathered round.

Evangeline is not the only one who has waited here in disappointment. Where are the schools that you have waited for your children to have, that have never come? Where are the roads and the highways that you send your money to build, that are no nearer now than ever before? Where are the institutions to care for the sick and disabled? Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment, but it lasted through only one lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak, have lasted for generations. Give me the chance to dry the eyes of those who still weep here!

Long rammed laws through the legislature, bypassing the formerly powerful and trampling the toes of the wealthy. He bent some rules in the process, and the bending allowed his enemies to mount an effort to impeach him. Punches were thrown in the state house of representatives; blood was drawn. Long looked to the senate for support, persuading a core of senators to announce for acquittal even before the charges were fully aired. He lived to fight another day, with different tactics than before. “I used to try to get things done by saying ‘please,’” he said (to the puzzlement of those many who had never heard the word pass his lips). “That didn’t work, and now I’m a dynamiter.”

Louisiana law forbade Long from succeeding himself as governor in 1932, and so, before his term was half finished, he plotted how to take his high-explosive act elsewhere. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 1930 and won but declined to assume his seat until he could arrange the election of a minion as his replacement for governor. Oscar Allen fit the bill perfectly, demonstrating not the slightest independence. “A leaf once blew in the window of Allen’s office and fell on his desk,” Long’s brother Earl said. “Allen signed it.”

The Great Depression hit Louisiana harder than most states. Long hit back with methods not dissimilar to those Roosevelt would employ at the national level. He poured money into public works, building bridges by the score and paving roads by the thousands of miles. He hatched a plan to curtail cotton production by means of a cotton holiday: a concerted refusal by southern farmers to plant a cotton crop in 1932. The holiday never happened, because of Long’s inability to secure the support of other cotton states, but it softened up the opposition to the less drastic crop restrictions Roosevelt’s AAA would introduce. It also allowed Long to cast himself as the champion of poor folks all across the South. “You are the Moses of the cotton farmer,” one of those farmers told him.

Long sided with Roosevelt in 1932, albeit ungraciously. “I don’t like your son of a bitch,” he told an emissary from the Roosevelt camp. “But I’ll be for him.” In public Long played the loyal Democrat, and he won votes for the Roosevelt ticket in the districts where he stumped for it—all the while expanding his own voter base. His salvos against the citadel of privilege amazed even hardened journalists. “Seven motor trucks and Senator Long’s private automobile composed the campaign caravan,” one reporter wrote. “Two of the trucks were the specially designed and built sound trucks developed by him…. Each is equipped with four amplifying horns. Inside the vehicle body are the loudspeaker panels, an attachment for playing phonograph records, several folding chairs, a folding table, a pitcher and glasses.” One of the sound trucks would arrive at a rally half an hour before Long was scheduled to speak. It would play music and draw a crowd. Long’s car would pull up, and the senator would leap out. By no means were all of his listeners starving; many drove in their own cars, clogging the roads for miles around. But soon he’d have them believing the wolf was at the very door.

Think of it, my friends! In 1930 there were 540 men in Wall Street who made $100,000,000 more than all the wheat farmers and all the cotton farmers and all the cane farmers of this country put together! Millions and millions and millions of farmers in this country, and yet 540 men in Wall Street made $100,000,000 more than all those millions of farmers! And you people wonder why your belly’s flat up against your backbone!

Long stuck with Roosevelt only until the latter’s inauguration. He challenged the president on the emergency banking bill, complaining that it did more for bank owners than for bank depositors. He joined the cry against Roosevelt on the budget act. He deplored the industrial codes of the NRA as capitulation to capital. “I want to stay on good terms with the administration,” he declared unpersuasively, “and I am going to do so if it is possible, but I do not have to.”

Roosevelt initially ignored Long’s criticism, even after Long followed the president onto the airwaves with radio chats of his own—although in Long’s case the chats tended to be rants. In June 1933, however, Roosevelt decided to put Long in his place. He invited the senator for a visit. “It was a morning appointment,” James Farley remembered. “The day was hot, and Huey came charging into the White House in his usual breezy and jaunty manner. He was nattily dressed in light summer clothes and wore a sailor straw hat with a bright-colored band.” The conversation commenced innocuously but grew warm when Long claimed credit for Roosevelt’s nomination at Chicago. Farley, who thought he had had something to do with the convention’s decision, pointed out that Long’s Louisiana delegation had been seated only with the assistance of then-Governor Roosevelt. The tone sharpened the more. “Huey had come in with a chip on his shoulder, and although his words were courteous enough, it was obvious from his attitude that he was there for the purpose of testing the mettle of the President.” Long conspicuously kept his hat on during the conversation. “At first I thought it was an oversight,” Farley said, “but soon realized it was deliberate.” Farley couldn’t decide whether to call the senator on his discourtesy or keep quiet. The president silently warned him off. “I glanced at Roosevelt and saw that he was perfectly aware of what was taking place and, furthermore, was enjoying it immensely…. He had a broad smile on his face which never changed for a moment, not even when Huey leaned over to tap him on the knee or elbow with the straw hat to emphasize one of his finer points, a trick which Huey pulled not once but several times.” Marvin McIntyre, Roosevelt’s appointment secretary, missed Roosevelt’s cue. “I saw McIntyre standing there with his teeth clenched and I thought for a moment that he was going to walk over and pull the hat off Huey’s head.” Long finally got the message and took the hat off.

Long had arrived hoping to receive assurance that he would be consulted in the awarding of federal patronage in Louisiana. He left with nothing. “What the hell is the use of coming down to see this fellow?” he complained to Farley on the way out. “I can’t win any decision over him.” Nor did he win any appointments. As the jobs went to his rivals in Louisiana, his anger mounted. He tried to block federal funds spent in Louisiana by his enemies, and when he was chastised by Interior Secretary Ickes, he summoned reporters to read them his bill of particulars against the New Deal. He urged the newsmen to wire his message north. “While you are at it, pay them my further respects up there in Washington. Tell them they can go to hell.”

Roosevelt’s opposition wounded Long briefly. The Roosevelt forces in Louisiana mobilized against the Long alliance, while the senator himself spun momentarily out of control. A drunken incident involving a crowded public bathroom and Long’s urine soaking the trousers of another man resulted in a black eye for Long, physically and politically. Northeastern papers tut-tutted the southern bumpkin; some southern papers did, too. Long looked to be down, perhaps for the count.

But he regained his feet with a program—or rather a promise—that threatened to suck the air right out of the New Deal. Long’s Share Our Wealth plan proposed a radical redistribution of American wealth. A draconianly progressive wealth tax, rising to confiscation on fortunes above $8 million, would fund a guaranteed income for every family in America, as well as pensions for the elderly, aid to schools, and additional public works. “God invited us all to come and eat and drink all we wanted,” Long asserted. “He smiled on our land and we grew crops of plenty to eat and wear. He showed us in the earth the iron and other things to make everything we wanted. He unfolded to us the secrets of science so that our work might be easy. God called: ‘Come to my feast.’” But a greedy few had elbowed everyone else aside. “Rockefeller, Morgan, and their crowd stepped up and took enough for 120 million people, and left only enough for 5 million for all the other 125 million to eat. And so many millions must go hungry and without these good things God gave us unless we call on them to put some of it back.” By Long’s reckoning, the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans owned 60 percent of the wealth; this imbalance explained much of the country’s current predicament. Equity and efficiency pointed in the same direction: toward a sharing of America’s wealth. The rich hoarded their wealth, causing the current depression. The poor would spend this wealth, reviving the engines of prosperity.

Long’s plan had problems, starting with its arithmetic. There simply weren’t enough rich people to provide the incomes he promised. But this didn’t prevent the concept from catching on. Share Our Wealth clubs sprouted all over the country. By early 1935 Long boasted of some twenty-seven thousand chapters and seven million adherents. No one took these numbers at face value, but even discounted for Kingfish hyperbole, they signified a large and growing demand for measures more radical than anything Roosevelt had contemplated thus far.

HUEY LONG WAS better at tapping popular passions than Roosevelt, but he wasn’t as good as Charles Coughlin, in part because Coughlin wasn’t at first so obviously political. In fact Coughlin wasn’t obviously anything, except exceedingly good at radio, better even than Roosevelt. Coughlin was called the “Radio Priest” because, not long after taking charge of a struggling parish in suburban Detroit, he talked a local station manager—like Coughlin, an Irish Catholic—into giving him air time to raise money and combat the noxious preachments of the Ku Klux Klan. Coughlin proved to be a radio prodigy, with “a voice of such mellow richness,” author and fan Wallace Stegner said, “such manly, heart-warming, confidential intimacy, such emotional and ingratiating charm, that anyone tuning past it on the radio dial almost automatically returned to hear it again…. It was a voice made for promises.”

At first it promised merely heaven: eternal bliss to those who embraced the Gospels and the teachings of the Church and contributed to the Shrine of the Little Flower, as he called his parish church. But not long after the start of the depression Coughlin’s sermons turned political. Radio stations across the industrial Midwest had begun carrying Coughlin’s program; no part of the country suffered more painfully from the collapse of American manufacturing. Catholic theology was broad enough to embrace both defenders of the status quo and advocates of social change; Coughlin sided at first with the latter. He backed Roosevelt for president in 1932, although, as he explained to the candidate, he couldn’t deliver a formal endorsement without violating his clerical neutrality. But after Roosevelt’s election and inauguration he declared, “The New Deal is Christ’s deal,” and he treated the president as the best friend America’s poor had ever had.

He also treated the president as his own best friend, annoying those who truly were close to Roosevelt. Marvin McIntyre got almost as testy at Coughlin as he did at Huey Long, notwithstanding McIntyre’s engrained respect for the Roman collar. But Roosevelt told his people to be nice to Coughlin, and he encouraged the priest to continue to forward helpful suggestions.

In time, though, Coughlin caught on that his suggestions weren’t being taken seriously. The last thing Roosevelt needed was more advice on money, but this was precisely what Coughlin made his primary cause. Coughlin insisted on devaluing the dollar by raising the price of gold, which accorded with Roosevelt’s plans, and by remonetizing silver, which didn’t. Coughlin became to silver in the 1930s what William Jennings Bryan had been in the 1890s, except that Coughlin, while praising silver’s benefits for ordinary people, was speculating in silver futures for himself. In the spring of 1934 the administration published a list of large purchasers of silver futures; the general point of the publication was to demonstrate that the demand for silver money was less than disinterested. Whether anyone in the White House initially realized that the list included Coughlin’s personal secretary is unclear, but the 500,000 forward ounces she bought—on her own account, she unconvincingly claimed—seemed solid evidence that Coughlin had reasons less lofty than the popular welfare for praising the white metal.

Coughlin probably didn’t need the embarrassment of the silver scandal to turn openly against Roosevelt, but the incident added a personal element to his animus. Though his priestly vows presumably prevented a run for office in his own name, he organized what he called the National Union for Social Justice, which advocated policies more advanced, from a vaguely social-justice perspective, than those of the New Deal. Coughlin’s radio program promoted the organization to its millions of listeners; Coughlin complemented his broadcasts with rallies that made the National Union look increasingly like a third party.

PRECISELY BECAUSE his ambitions were less patent than Long’s or Coughlin’s, Francis Townsend posed a greater threat to Roosevelt than either the Kingfish or the Radio Priest. Dr. Townsend didn’t start practicing medicine till he was in his mid-thirties; he didn’t leave South Dakota for Southern California till he was past fifty; he didn’t find his true calling—political agitation—till he was pushing retirement. And retirement was precisely what he began pushing in 1934, when he and a Texas promoter named Robert Clements formed Old Age Revolving Pensions, Ltd. Their brainstorm was pensions with a twist: the federal government should pay two hundred dollars per month to every American over sixty, on the strict condition that the recipients retire from work and spend the money as it came in. The spending was what inspired the “revolving” label, and it would, according to the Townsend Plan, underwrite the whole program by forcing the money to recirculate, thereby reviving the economy. A sales tax would provide the direct funding, but in a larger sense the plan would fund itself, through the prosperity it would restore. The jobs released by those sexagenarians currently working would furnish immediate benefits to the younger men and women who moved into them.

The mathematics of the Townsend Plan were as dubious as those of Long’s wealth-sharing scheme; eminent critics noted that more than half the country’s output would be diverted to less than a tenth of the population. “Dr. Townsend’s error lies in forgetting the simple truth that someone must produce the wealth which is consumed by the non-producers, be they infants, old people, sick people, the unemployed, the idle rich, or the criminal classes,” Walter Lippmann explained. “If Dr. Townsend’s medicine were a good remedy, the more people the country could find to support in idleness, the better off it would be.” Townsend was unimpressed by Lippmann’s logic and unfazed by his criticism. “My plan is too simple to be comprehended by great minds like Mr. Lippmann’s,” he said.

Equally unimpressed were the tens of millions of men and women who joined the tens of thousands of Townsend Clubs around the country and who put their signatures to a petition Townsend circulated, calling on Congress to enact his plan. “The zeal of those promoting the plan is evangelical, almost fanatic,” conservative columnist Mark Sullivan observed. “The pressure on Congress is much greater than was ever brought by veterans for the bonus…. Promoters of the bill say it is supported by ten million persons over 60, ten million more who have dependents over 60, and twenty million more who expect to become 60 some time—and to whom the plan looks good. That would be about all the voters there are.” Sullivan exaggerated for effect—but the effect wasn’t lost on members of Congress. Oregon Republican William Ekwall captured the spirit in the House when he declared, “About 120,000 people in my district have signed a Townsend petition. When I first heard of this I laughed at it. Then I got the smile off my face. It’s like a punching bag—you can’t dodge it. If we don’t pass it this session we’ll have to meet it when we get back home.”

BY THE AUTUMN of 1934 it seemed that everyone was promoting a plan to end the depression. Upton Sinclair, the muckraking journalist from the days of Theodore Roosevelt, had, like Townsend, moved to California, where the same passion that had inspired The Jungle, his exposé of the meatpacking industry—which was supposed to drive America to socialism rather than vegetarianism—gave rise to EPIC, short for “End Poverty in California.” Sinclair’s plan aimed to turn the means of production in the state over to the producers. The state would supply land to the landless and factories to the jobless. It would also print pseudo-money that could be spent only on items grown or manufactured within EPIC’s pseudo-economy. To publicize his plan, Sinclair announced his candidacy for California governor. Or perhaps the point of his plan was to publicize his candidacy; either way, the plan and the candidacy garnered great publicity. In the Democratic primary Sinclair trounced the mainstream candidate and polled more votes than the incumbent governor did in the Republican primary. Veteran observers of California politics, even while scratching their heads trying to understand the EPIC phenomenon, saw little to prevent Sinclair from sweeping into the governor’s house in November. Sinclair requested a conference with Roosevelt, which Roosevelt declined, leaving Sinclair to proclaim his revelation on his own. “Capitalism has served its time and is passing from the face of the earth,” he said. “A new system must be found to take its place.”

IT WASN’T AN accident that land-transferring socialism took hold in California. Though nicknamed for its mining past, the Golden State lived or died on agriculture, and in the mid-1930s it was on the verge of dying. The same problems of overproduction that vexed farmers elsewhere existed in California, but they were exacerbated by the historic tendency of Americans in other parts of the country to look west for solutions to their problems. During the depression no part of the country suffered more than the Great Plains, where a host of evils beset farmers who hadn’t been prosperous to begin with. Excessive optimism during the homestead era of the late nineteenth century had led to the settlement of districts that couldn’t really support the communities planted upon them; modern technology permitted the plowing of vast swaths of grassland that never should have been broken and turned; unprecedented demand during the World War had driven prices to unsustainable levels. Prices fell after the war, weakening the economies of the Plains states. They fell further with the onset of the depression.

Then the rains ceased. Farmers hadn’t lived on the Plains long enough to know that drought was part of the recurrent climate pattern in that region (the aboriginal peoples knew, which was why they didn’t try to farm there). Some farmers attributed the drought to bad luck, others to the wrath of God. The wrathful explanation seemed the more persuasive when hot winds blew across the parched, torn earth and lifted tons of topsoil high into the air, building battlements of brown, churning dust five thousand feet tall and fifty miles long that blotted out the sun and choked humans and livestock as the wave of airborne topsoil rolled across villages, towns, and cities.

Lorena Hickok encountered a dust storm on the northern Plains. Harry Hopkins had put her to work reporting on the lives of ordinary Americans, in order to determine where federal relief was needed most. “When I got up at 7:30 this morning, the sky seemed to be clear,” she wrote from South Dakota.

But you couldn’t see the sun! There was a queer brown haze—only right above was the sky clear. And the wind was blowing a gale. It kept on blowing, harder and harder. And the haze kept mounting in the sky. By the time we had finished breakfast and were ready to start out, about 9, the sun was only a lighter spot in the dust that filled the sky like a brown fog. We drove only a few miles and had to turn back. It got worse and worse, rapidly. You couldn’t see a foot ahead by the time we got back, and we had a time getting back! It was like driving through a fog, only worse, for there was that damnable wind. It seemed as though the car would be blown right off the road any minute. When we stopped, we had to put on the emergency brake. It was a truly terrifying experience. We were being whirled off into space in a vast, impenetrable cloud of brown dust.

They had the street lights on when we finally groped our way back into town. They stayed on the rest of the day. By noon the sun wasn’t even a light spot in the sky any more. You couldn’t see it at all. It was so dark, and the dust was so thick that you couldn’t see across the street. I was lying on the bed reading the paper and glanced up—the window looked black, just as it does at night. I was terrified, for a moment. It seemed like the end of the world.

Farming became impossible in the Dust Bowl, as a large swath of the Plains was soon called. Farm families left the region by the tens of thousands, fleeing to California. They didn’t know what they would find there, but they were certain it couldn’t be worse than what they were leaving. Their journey became a social and human epic, a tale of tragedy and courage immortalized in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and similar works; their experience contributed to the political EPIC of Upton Sinclair after their arrival added to the glut of agricultural workers in California. Some of the migrants turned militant, joining the Communist party or at least following the Communists out on strike in the Salinas and Imperial valleys. But a larger number found Sinclair’s promise of land to the landless more appealing. Democratic socialism they could stomach, revolutionary communism probably not.

HARRY BRIDGES ARRIVED in the United States from Australia shortly after the World War. He joined the radical Industrial Workers of the World as the Wobblies’ never-promising fortunes faded amid the postwar crackdown on leftists, but he soon jumped ship for the San Francisco local of the International Longshoremen’s Association. From the standpoint of steady work, this was another bad move, for the ILA had been shunned by the dock owners since a wrenching strike at the war’s end. Bridges was blacklisted, making him more radical than ever. Whether or not he formally joined the Communist party became a matter of later dispute, but he didn’t disguise his belief that the Marxists had it right on the inevitability of class struggle between workers and owners. A dock strike in San Francisco in July 1934 turned lethally violent when the owners imported strikebreakers and the strikers resisted. The police opened fire, killing two strikers. Bridges’s charisma and pugnacity had propelled him to leadership among the dockers, and in the wake of the killings he attempted to extend his reach by calling a general strike of all workers in the city. General strikes in other countries had often foreshadowed revolution, and this one got off to a promising start. For nearly a week the city was paralyzed, its docks closed, its cable cars still, its warehouses silent. The summer fog off the ocean rolled down streets vacant of traffic and almost empty of pedestrians. Eventually the spell broke, and the workers drifted back to their jobs. But rarely had labor shown such strength, and never in American history had the possibility of a working-class revolution loomed so large.

Militant unionists mobilized similarly in Minneapolis. The Teamsters played the role in the Twin Cities that the longshoremen filled at the Golden Gate; the conflict the Teamsters provoked—or suffered, depending on one’s point of view—was even bloodier than that in San Francisco. Police fire killed two and wounded more than sixty. Governor Floyd Olson, no lackey of capital, was so alarmed that he imposed martial law lest the violence escalate or Minneapolis follow San Francisco into a general strike.

The labor violence spread still further east as the summer faded. Textile workers in New England complained that mill owners weren’t honoring their commitments to the cotton code of the NRA; when the owners ignored the complaints the workers struck. Sympathizers in several eastern states joined the stoppage, and vandals and arsonists soon jumped in. Again the police entered the fray; again blood flowed in the gutters. “A few hundred funerals,” a textile trade paper editorialized, “will have a quieting influence.”

ROOSEVELT WOULD HAVE been forced to comment on the strikes had he not spent the month of the worst of the fighting incommunicado. At the beginning of July he embarked on the first two-ocean cruise ever undertaken by a president. His ship was the Houston, one of the new class of American destroyers. At six hundred feet in length and a mere sixty-five feet abeam, it sliced through the seas as swiftly as any vessel afloat. “Her quoted speed is 30 knots, but her officers smile when they say it,” a reporter covering the voyage explained. Roosevelt chose the Houston for its speed but also for the fact that as a fleet flagship the vessel had quarters for an admiral—or a president—in addition to those for its own commander. The crew painted and polished the ship and rearranged a few things for his convenience. A space on deck was cleared so he could view films and newsreels when the evening was calm. Otherwise Roosevelt insisted on experiencing the ship in the same manner as its officers and men. They would be sailing through steamy weather and sultry seas; his cabin was to be ventilated but not cooled. “There is no such luxury as air-conditioning aboard, and no one denies that when the sun beats down on a steel ship it generates heat,” the reporter remarked.

Roosevelt’s voyage had several objectives. Not the least was simple rest and relaxation. Salt air had always invigorated his mind and body, and he expected it would invigorate him now. Presidential holidays on land presented problems of logistics and security; on board the Houston these largely disappeared. Roosevelt wanted to visit some of America’s strategic overseas possessions, particularly Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, and Hawaii. He wished to be the first American president to traverse the Panama Canal.

He also desired to lend a personal touch to his foreign policy toward Latin America. For the century since the announcement of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States had treated Latin America as its peculiar sphere of influence. This had never sat well with most Latin Americans, who interpreted America’s seizure of half of Mexico in the 1840s, its invasion of Cuba in 1898, its annexation of Puerto Rico in 1899, and its occupation of several Central American and Caribbean countries during the first quarter of the twentieth century as evidence of Yankee arrogance and hostility toward self-determination south of the Rio Grande. By the late 1920s the American policy had begun to appear counterproductive even to Washington, and Herbert Hoover quietly charted a new course.

But it was left to Franklin Roosevelt to proclaim the new approach publicly. “In the field of world policy,” he declared in his inaugural address, “I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.” There was more to this statement than improving relations with Latin America; Roosevelt intended it as a condemnation of Japan’s treatment of China and a warning to Germany not to defy its treaty commitments to the rest of Europe. Yet the very demands of broader American interests made improving relations with Latin America the more imperative. Roosevelt sent Cordell Hull to Montevideo, where the secretary of state added America’s signature to a statement denying the right of any country in the hemisphere to intervene in the affairs of any other country. As such intervention was a prerogative Theodore Roosevelt had claimed for the United States vis-à-vis Latin America, Franklin Roosevelt’s declaration, in December 1933, that “the definite policy of the United States from now on is one opposed to armed intervention” assumed special significance.

Six months later Roosevelt complemented his friendly words with a presidential visit to Latin America. In Haiti, where American marines had been stationed since Woodrow Wilson’s first term, he pledged to withdraw the troops and turn control of the country over to the Haitian government. In Colombia he proclaimed a new era in hemispheric relations, one characterized by fair play and justice. In Panama he congratulated the people of that country for their role in constructing the great canal through which the Houston passed, and he expressed hope that the partnership would continue.

From Panama the Houston steamed west to Hawaii. The governor of the territory threw a giant luau; sixty thousand people turned out to honor the president. Roosevelt ate poi and pineapple and applauded the hula dancers; he took particular note of construction on the naval facility at Pearl Harbor. The president’s motorcade rolled past the machine shops and warehouses that fitted and repaired the Pacific fleet and past the tank farm where the navy stored the oil that fueled the ships’ mighty engines. He saw the giant drydock that had collapsed mysteriously while under construction but that had been completed and now serviced the navy’s largest vessels. He gazed upward at the eight-hundred-foot radio masts that allowed Pearl to communicate with vessels far at sea and was told that even more powerful facilities were being built across the island. He drove by the hospital and other medical facilities and toured the submarine base, where he reviewed the seamen and the civilian personnel. A flyover by eighty warplanes—fighters and bombers—concluded the review.

Roosevelt applauded the pilots, the seamen, and everyone else at Pearl. “They constitute an integral part of our national defense,” he declared.

BY THE TIME Roosevelt returned to the West Coast, the dock strikes had ended. The timing wasn’t accidental. He could have come home earlier to deal with the strikes, and some in the administration thought he should. But Roosevelt saw little to be gained. As Louis Howe explained to Frances Perkins, who was wondering whether Roosevelt should sail to San Francisco upon the outbreak of the general strike in that city: “It will put the president right in the middle of an obligation to settle whatever is wrong out there. He’s in no position to do that…. He shouldn’t do it anyway.” Roosevelt agreed, and kept away.

His eventual return coincided with the start of the 1934 congressional races. Incumbent presidents’ parties typically suffer at the midterm, especially following such overwhelming victories as Roosevelt and the Democrats won in 1932. Rarely do such candidates and parties live up to the hopes that bore them into office, and voters make them pay for the disappointment. The remarkable popular reaction to the promises and programs of Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Francis Townsend, and Upton Sinclair, and the radical agitation among industrial workers, revealed the deep desire of millions of Americans for more than Roosevelt and the Democrats were currently delivering. On the single issue that mattered more to Americans than any other—the state of the economy—Roosevelt didn’t have much to offer. The promising signs of the spring and summer of 1933 had given way to a brief drop, which had been followed by another stretch of recovery. From October 1933 to March 1934 the New York Times index of economic activity rose by nearly 20 percent. But the growth stalled, and for the rest of the year the economy stagnated. As a whole, 1934 proved better than 1933, but production remained far below what it had been in 1929. The New Deal had alleviated America’s despair, but it hadn’t ended the depression.

Roosevelt nonetheless determined to make the elections a referendum on the New Deal. As he traveled east from Portland, he stopped in the Columbia Gorge at the construction site of the Bonneville Dam. He praised the engineers and workers for their magnificent efforts, and, while not mentioning Upton Sinclair’s land-redistribution program directly, he pointed out that the electricity and the irrigation provided by the Bonneville Dam and other dams on the Columbia would yield much the same result as Sinclair’s scheme. At Glacier National Park he lauded the accomplishments of the young men of the CCC in improving the park and improving themselves. At Green Bay he praised Wisconsin’s senators, Republican Robert La Follette Jr. and Democrat Francis Ryan Duffy—“both old friends of mine”—for their bipartisan support of the New Deal.

Arriving in Hyde Park at the end of August, Roosevelt rounded out the campaign with his most sweeping defense of the New Deal. He ticked off the achievements of the administration in rescuing the banks, cleaning up the stock market, boosting farm prices, rationalizing industry, protecting workers, employing the jobless, and generally restoring hope. He acknowledged that some of the new programs were expensive. But the alternative would have been more expensive. “No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources.” Certain critics said strong measures had been necessary but were no longer needed. “Now that these people are coming out of their storm cellars,” Roosevelt scoffed, “they forget that there ever was a storm.” Conservatives complained that the New Deal eroded individual liberty. Liberty was indeed the issue, the president said, but liberty meant more than letting the rich and powerful do whatever they would. “I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few. I prefer and I am sure you prefer that broader definition of liberty under which we are moving forward to greater freedom, to greater security for the average man than he has ever known before in the history of America.”

Roosevelt’s strategy of converting the congressional elections into a personal referendum succeeded brilliantly. John Nance Garner, a veteran of many campaigns, had asserted that if the Republicans won no more than three dozen seats in the House, the administration would be justified in declaring the result a victory. The Republicans not only did not win three dozen seats but lost thirteen seats, leaving them outnumbered by the Democrats by more than three to one. In the Senate the GOP surrendered nine seats to the Democrats. The state races reflected the national trend; Republicans wound up in control of the governor’s mansions in a mere seven of the forty-eight states.

As the experts recovered from their shock, they unanimously agreed on a single explanation for the Democratic victories: Roosevelt. “He has been all but crowned by the people,” Republican William Allen White glumly acknowledged.

30.

SOCIAL SECURITY HAD A DOZEN FATHERS IN AMERICA AND ONE MOTHER. Frances Perkins became Roosevelt’s lieutenant for social security by virtue of being secretary of labor, a social worker, and a woman. As secretary of labor she oversaw America’s labor force, which, to her way of thinking and Roosevelt’s, required assistance when its members were temporarily without jobs, were disabled, or were retired. As a social worker she had long experience dealing with the less fortunate among the American people. As a woman (and a mother) she was presumed to have a sensibility withheld from some of her male colleagues.

American progressives had been talking up unemployment insurance and old-age pensions since before the World War. Roosevelt had signed on to this dual version of social security during the 1920s, endorsing it for New York during his time as governor. The Democratic party embraced the concept in its 1932 platform. But different people had different ideas as to how it should be effected. Some thought the burden should fall on business; others relied on government. Some believed the states should take the lead; others looked to Washington. Some advocated focusing on the most vulnerable groups of workers and their dependents; others adopted a more inclusive view.

Roosevelt thought bigger than most. “There is no reason why everybody in the United States should not be covered,” he told Perkins. “I see no reason why every child, from the day he is born, shouldn’t be a member of the social security system. 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.”

Roosevelt wanted a system that was simple and ubiquitous—“so simple that everybody will understand it,” he said. “The system ought to be operated through the post offices. Just simple and natural—nothing elaborate or alarming about it…. And there is no reason why just the industrial workers should get the benefit of this. Everybody ought to be in on it—the farmer and his wife and his family.” Roosevelt thought postmen could double as social security agents, especially in the countryside. “The rural free delivery carrier ought to bring papers to the door and pick them up after they are filled out. The rural free delivery carrier ought to give each child his social insurance number and his policy or whatever takes the place of a policy. The rural free delivery carrier ought to be the one who picks up the claim of the man who is unemployed, or of the lady who wants old-age insurance benefits.”

Leaning back in his chair, imagining the smiles on the faces of those women, children, and old people, the president concluded: “I don’t see why not. I don’t see why not. Cradle to the grave—from the cradle to the grave they ought to be in a social insurance system.”

Perkins believed Roosevelt was dreaming. “I felt sure that the political climate was not right for such a universal approach,” she recalled. Not only would it contradict the individualism and self-sufficiency on which Americans had long prided themselves, it would break the budget. The most feasible plans linked contributions to payments: what individuals would receive, during periods of unemployment or in old age, would be tied to what they contributed, during periods of work. But building up the reserve fund to sustain the payments would take time. In the interim, somebody else would have to cover the costs.

Roosevelt rejected Perkins’s caution. He acknowledged that the program would be deflationary, at least at first, in that it would take money out of circulation through the taxes that supported it. “We can’t help that,” he said. “We have to get it started or it will never start.” Yet he told Perkins to trim where she could, starting with staffing the conceptual development of the program. “Be economical. Borrow people around the government from different bureaus. Don’t go outside any more than you are obliged to.”

The serious planning began in the summer of 1934. Under the authority of the National Industrial Recovery Act, Roosevelt created a Committee on Economic Security, broadly charged with studying problems relating to the security of individuals and with proposing solutions to those problems. Perkins headed the committee. “We borrowed from every department,” Perkins remembered: “economists, analysts, lawyers, clerical and stenographic workers, statistical experts, and equipment.” Harry Hopkins kicked in $125,000 from his relief budget to cover operating expenses. The committee considered several basic questions. Should the program concentrate on temporary troubles like unemployment and workplace injuries? Should it deal with longer-term challenges like permanent disabilities? Should it emphasize normal and foreseeable developments, in particular retirement? Should medical insurance be part of the package? Should social security be a federal program or a federal-state partnership? Should it be funded by workers, by business, or by general tax revenues? Should payments be based on need or on worker contributions?

The committee examined various models. Other countries had established social security systems years or decades earlier; these shed light on how particular aspects of unemployment compensation, disability insurance, and pension programs operated in practice. In the United States, Wisconsin had established an unemployment compensation program in 1932; many Wisconsinites thought it could serve as a template for a national program.

The committee heard testimony from numerous groups. Business leaders feared that a tax on business would simply prolong the depression. Labor leaders liked the general concept of social security, but some worried that it would weaken unions by causing workers to look to government rather than to the unions for their welfare. Townsendites and other advocates for the elderly wanted to ensure that pension payments were high enough to meet the needs of retired people.

Roosevelt let the committee do its work but provided guidance at key moments. Perkins called a conference at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel in November 1934, to which two hundred industry leaders, labor officials, and academic experts were invited. Roosevelt received the group at the White House and offered his opinions as to what a system of social security ought to encompass. “Unemployment insurance will be in the program,” he said definitively. He contended that the program ought to be a federal-state collaboration, allowing experimentation by the separate states but affording guarantees only the federal government could provide. Unemployment insurance should be funded by workplace contributions rather than general taxes; workers would pay for what they received. “It is not charity.” Old-age pensions, too, should be based on “insurance principles”—that is, on specific contributions by individual workers. Some committee members advocated including health insurance under the social security umbrella. Roosevelt agreed that illness was “a very serious matter for many families with and without incomes,” but he remarked that health insurance might be added to the package “later on.”

Two problems, related to each other, proved the most refractory in developing the social security concept. The first had to do with funding. If pensions were funded entirely by contributions, workers already near retirement would receive pitifully small amounts. Some contribution from general revenues almost certainly would be necessary for the first several years of the program.

The second problem involved the constitutionality of the program. Whether the federal government could compel workers and business to contribute to a social security plan had never been tested. Roosevelt’s worries on this point pushed him toward the federal-state collaboration. As Perkins noted, “If the federal aspects of the law were declared unconstitutional, in the federal-state system we would at least have state laws which could be upheld legally.”

Perkins took some encouragement on both issues from a personal encounter with Harlan Fiske Stone. The secretary of labor and the Supreme Court justice found themselves at a reception together; Perkins described what her committee was up to but added that she worried about the constitutionality of the program it would propose. “Your court tells us what the Constitution permits,” she said in a statement that was also a question. Stone replied softly, “The taxing power of the federal government, my dear—the taxing power is sufficient for everything you want and need.”

Roosevelt resisted applying the general taxing power to social security. As often as the committee contended that taxes were necessary, the president responded, “Ah, but this is the same old dole under another name.” When the committee recommended funding part of the program with deferred taxes—that is, by increasing the current deficit and letting future generations pay the cost—he declared, “It is almost dishonest to build up an accumulated deficit…. We can’t do that. We can’t sell the United States short in 1980 anymore than in 1935.”

Yet the demand for a tax-funded system mounted. Roosevelt knew that Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth scheme and Francis Townsend’s revolving pension plan were fiscal folly, but he also knew that they were political magic. Looking to the elections of 1936, he determined that the administration had to come up with a program that would provide pensions soon enough and large enough to satisfy at least some of the redistributionists. “We have to have it,” he told Perkins. “The Congress can’t stand the pressure of the Townsend Plan unless we have a real old-age insurance system.”

The need to get social security up and running compelled Roosevelt to accept a funding scheme that combined individual contributions with receipts from general revenues. In defending this compromise to a critic who complained that the contributional aspect of the program, embodied in payroll taxes, did nothing to rectify economic inequality, the president explained, “I guess you’re right on the economics. But those taxes were never a problem of economics. 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.”

IN JANUARY 1935 four bills were introduced in Congress displaying various aspects of Roosevelt’s design for social security. A more fastidious president might have insisted that his allies on Capitol Hill speak with a single voice. But Roosevelt refused to preempt those lawmakers who wanted to see their names on what might be the most important piece of legislation in a decade. “You will hurt Bob Doughton’s feelings,” he told Perkins, by way of explaining what would happen if she told the North Carolina Democrat not to introduce a bill bearing his own name. Roosevelt’s politeness was pragmatic as well. Doughton chaired the House ways and means committee; his enthusiastic support would be essential to the success of social security both now, in the authorization stage, and later, in appropriations. Besides, Roosevelt reckoned that multiple targets would be harder for the enemies of social security to hit.

The hostile fire commenced immediately. The National Association of Manufacturers called social security the first step toward “ultimate socialistic control of life and industry.” Alfred P. Sloan, the chairman of General Motors, declared, “Industry has every reason to be alarmed at the social, economic, and financial implications…. The dangers are manifest.” Republican representative John Taber of New York confused Congress with the world but nonetheless made plain his profound alarm: “Never in the history of the world 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.” Taber’s Republican and New York colleague James Wadsworth asserted ominously, “This bill opens the door and invites the entrance into the political field of a power so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants.” Daniel Reed, yet another GOP representative from Roosevelt’s home state, waxed wroth more succinctly: “The lash of the dictator will be felt.”

Roosevelt let his enemies rage. The 1934 elections had made him invulnerable, for the time being at least. And most of the senators and representatives interpreted the pressure from Townsend and Long just as he anticipated. After the competing bills were amalgamated in each chamber, the resulting measures passed the House on a vote of 371 to 33 and the Senate by 76 to 6. Reconciliation required additional heavy lifting, but on August 14, 1935, Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. The measure established a system of unemployment insurance, accident and disability benefits, support for dependent children, and old-age pensions. Life would never be without risks, Roosevelt explained at the signing, but the government could reduce the uncertainty. “We have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.” Congress should be proud of itself. “If the Senate and the House of Representatives in this long and arduous session had done nothing more than pass this bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time.”

LORENA HICKOK RECORDED the experience of the most destitute during the depression, and she explained what happened when a person in New York City applied for relief:

You go first to a schoolhouse in your neighborhood designated as a precinct home relief office. If you are the kind of person the government really should be interested in helping, you go there only as the last resort. You have used up all your resources and have strained the generosity of your relatives and friends to the breaking point. Your credit is gone. You couldn’t charge a nickel’s worth at the grocery store. You owe several months’ rent. The landlord has lost his patience and is threatening to throw you out. Maybe you’ve already gone through an eviction or two…. The chances are you’ve been hungry for some time. And now there’s no food in the house. You’ve simply got to do something.

If your children happen to attend the school where you must go to apply for relief, it just makes it that much tougher. It’s true, of course, that you don’t use the same entrance, that the chances are against your running into them or any of their playmates—but you don’t know that.

There will be a policeman around—maybe several. A lot more would be there inside of three minutes if you caused any commotion. The Commissioner of Public Welfare feels that serious riots have been prevented by locating each Home Relief Station within a short distance of a police station…. If you get by the policeman—and some people, I have been told, take one look at him, lose their courage, and turn around and go home—you have to tell some man at the door what you’re there for. If you’ve got any pride, it hurts. And maybe he isn’t any too patient. He’s on relief himself, perhaps totally unqualified temperamentally for the job and worried about how he’s going to make ends meet if he doesn’t get his paycheck next week….

You go into a room filled with people. Up at the front are a line of makeshift desks, where interviewers are taking down the stories of relief applicants. You sit down on a bench in the back of the room. And there you wait, wondering if they’re going to make you sell the radio, which wouldn’t bring in enough to feed the family two days…. Eventually you get your turn. May be the questions aren’t so bad, but you hate answering them just the same. If the person asking the questions were sympathetic and tactful, qualified by experience and temperament for the job, it might not be so bad. But the person asking those questions is just another victim of the depression like yourself…. Possibly he hates the job—and hates you because you’re part of it….

Finally you get out—and go home and wait.

What you waited for was word that Harry Hopkins had enough money to keep the wolf from your door for another month. As Roosevelt’s relief director, Hopkins headed first the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and later the Civil Works Administration. The president’s charge to Hopkins was to get money to state and local relief agencies as quickly as possible. “Action had to be immediate,” Roosevelt explained later. Congress provided Hopkins with $500 million, and Hopkins made a fast start spending it, disbursing $5 million in his first two hours on the job. “The half-billion dollars for direct relief of states won’t last a month if Harry L. Hopkins, new relief administrator, maintains the pace he set yesterday,” the Washington Post reported the morning after Hopkins began.

Hopkins soon became a symbol of the New Deal, ministering to the poorest and most unfortunate victims of the depression. He and those he gathered around him—“they were young, thin, overworked-looking, and tremendously alive,” a newcomer to the cadre wrote of the Hopkins crowd—tried to give work to the jobless in exchange for the aid they dispensed, but the work was secondary and sometimes nonexistent. Either way, the program was controversial. When the jobs didn’t appear, the workers were on the dole, which was bad for their morale and for the politics of relief. When the jobs did develop, they were often patently make-work, which was almost as bad.

Though Hopkins spent swiftly, he didn’t spend lightly. “It takes a lot of nerve to put your signature down on a piece of paper when it means that the government of the United States is going to pay out a million dollars to the unemployed in Chicago,” he explained. “It takes decision, because you’ll have to decide whether Chicago needs that money more than New York City or Los Angeles. You can’t care very much what people are going to say because when you’re handling other people’s money whatever you do is always wrong. If you try to hold down wages, you’ll be accused of union-busting and of grinding down the poor; if you pay a decent wage, you’ll be competing with private industry and pampering a lot of no-accounts.”

To help determine whether Chicago needed money more than New York, Hopkins relied on reports from agents he sent into the field. Lorena Hickok was one of the best. Hickok covered the country from east to west and north to south. In the coal valleys of West Virginia she learned that the greatest need was for hospitals. “There is not in the state a single city or county hospital with free clinics or free beds,” she wrote Hopkins. The endemic poverty of the people of the region had deepened amid the depression. “Some of them have been starving for eight years. I was told there are children in West Virginia who have never tasted milk.” The malnutrition magnified the chronic diseases of miners and their kin, and the maladies of the poor in general. “I heard of whole families having tuberculosis in some of the mining camps. There are the usual elements of typhoid…. Dysentery is so common that nobody says much about it. ‘We begin losing our babies with dysentery in September,’ one investigator remarked casually. Diphtheria was beginning to break out in Logan and Mingo counties when I was there.”

In Kentucky Hickok found the same problems and some others. “They are a curiously appealing people,” she said of the mountaineers of the eastern part of the state.

They all carry guns and shoot each other. And yet they never think of robbing people. I cannot for the life of me understand why they don’t go down and raid the Blue Grass country…. They shoot each other, and yet there is in them a great deal of gentleness. Toward their children, for instance. And you hear about them stories like this: Relief in Kentucky having been none too adequate in the matter of clothing, most of them are scantily clad. An investigator visiting one of their villages back up in the mountains in Clay county a few weeks ago noticed that all the men and boys, as they passed one cabin, pulled their caps down over their eyes. When asked why, they told him: “Well, you see, the women folks in that thar place hain’t got no clothes at all. Even their rags is clean wore out and gone.”

Adequate clothing was a problem in North Dakota too. Hickok described one farmer, no poorer than many on the Northern Plains. “‘Everything I own I have on my back,’ he said. He then explained that, having no underwear, he was wearing two pairs of overalls and two very ragged denim jackets. His shoes were so far gone that I wondered how he kept them on his feet.” Hickok was visiting in October; already the north wind nipped bare and lightly covered flesh. She and her companions walked about a farm house, shivering themselves in their thick coats and jackets. “When we came out to get into the car, we found it full of farmers, with all the windows closed. They apologized and said they had crawled in there to keep warm.”

ROOSEVELT DISLIKED relief as much as many of the recipients did. He acknowledged its necessity in the early days of his administration, but he never beat down his nagging concern that it demoralized its recipients and risked making the temporarily unemployed permanently unemployable. For this reason he determined to phase out relief in favor of jobs—private jobs if possible, government jobs if necessary.

The federal jobs program had been divided since 1933 between the fiefdoms of Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins. Different philosophies drove the two men. Ickes, heading the Interior Department’s Public Works Administration, thought like a businessman, insisting on value for money. He contended that federal projects should prime the pump of the private economy and then liquidate themselves. He preferred spending money on equipment to spending money on workers, as the former would stimulate employment among equipment manufacturers and strengthen the private sector, with long-term benefits for the whole economy. Hopkins, by contrast, thought like a social worker. His goal was to put as many people on the job as possible. What those people produced was less important than the fact that they received a paycheck. Their pay would benefit them at once and benefit the larger economy as they spent it on food, clothes, housing, and other necessities.

The competing philosophies produced confusion in the administration of the relief programs and bruises among the administrators. Ickes, the older of the two, constantly felt put upon. “I worked every Sunday and every holiday, Christmas included,” he recalled with martyred pride. “I signed all of the public works contracts myself. I must have signed, at first, at least 5,000, each one in triplicate. My desk used to be piled so high with stuff for signature that it was appalling. I was working beyond human endurance.”

Hopkins considered Ickes a plodder who simply didn’t understand the crisis the country faced. “All day planning the work program, which would be a great deal easier if Ickes would play ball,” he recorded in his diary in May 1935. “But he is stubborn and righteous, which is a hard combination. He is also the ‘great resigner’—anything doesn’t go his way, threatens to quit. He bores me.”

Ickes thought Hopkins a spendthrift. “It is becoming ever clearer that Hopkins is dominating this program,” Ickes said of relief in June 1935. “And this domination will mean thousands of inconsequential make-believe projects in all parts of the country.”

Administrative harmony and economic efficiency should have suggested that Roosevelt decide between his two relief administrators and their competing philosophies. But he didn’t. His refusal reflected his chronic difficulty letting subordinates go, but it also revealed his desire to play both sides of the street on the politics of relief. For those who wanted proof that the government’s relief dollars weren’t being wasted on meaningless projects, he pointed to the accomplishments of Ickes and the PWA, including the construction of the Bonneville Dam, the electrification of the Pennsylvania Railroad from Washington to New York, and the building of thousands of new schools, hundreds of hospitals, dozens of airports. To those who put more value on the number of jobs the government created, he cited Harry Hopkins, the FERA and CWA, and the 4.2 million Americans Hopkins put to work.

In the spring of 1935, as Roosevelt pondered how to expand the public works program, he had to decide who would handle the enlarged task. “Ickes is a good administrator, but often too slow,” Roosevelt mused. “Harry gets things done. I am going to give this job to Harry.” But not to Harry alone. The president appointed Hopkins head of a new agency, the Works Progress Administration, with charge of disbursing new federal job funds. Meanwhile Roosevelt made Ickes a member of the committee that oversaw allotments to the WPA. Ickes accepted the arrangement with comparative grace. “Hopkins will fly off on tangents unless he is watched,” Ickes remarked.

But Ickes and the committee couldn’t keep Hopkins grounded. Expanding on the fine print in the WPA charter, Hopkins launched numerous projects on his own authority. Before long he was encroaching on the territory of Ickes and the PWA. (It was at this point, if not before, that Ickes developed the conviction that Hopkins had chosen the name of his new agency to create deliberate confusion with the PWA.) Nominally the PWA was assigned all construction projects that cost over $25,000, but Hopkins defeated this provision by breaking large bids into several small contracts. And Hopkins was simply the more effective infighter. Hugh Johnson observed admiringly of Hopkins: “He has a mind like a razor, a tongue like a skinning knife, a temper like a Tartar, and a sufficient vocabulary of parlor profanity—words kosher enough to get by the censor but acid enough to make a mule-skinner jealous.”

Hopkins, moreover, had imagination Ickes lacked. While the great majority of WPA money went to build roads, bridges, schools, libraries, parks, and other uncontroversial facilities, Hopkins spent substantial sums putting writers and artists to work. The Federal Writers’ Project employed several thousand journalists, novelists, and poets to gather memories and news clips into oral histories, local histories, and guidebooks to the forty-eight states. The Federal Theater Project enlisted playwrights, directors, and actors to carry the dramatic arts to communities that often hadn’t received them. Similar visual art and music projects did much the same for the artists and audiences involved.

Hopkins’s projects provoked controversy. Some of the fuss focused on the mere idea of underwriting artists and intellectuals. Hopkins dismissed this part of the criticism with a wave of his cigarette. “Hell,” he said, “they’ve got to eat just like other people.” He had more trouble with the complaint that many of the productions, especially by the theater group, displayed a liberal-to-radical bias. He could explain that artists tended left and that to dictate content to artists would constitute censorship. But conservatives, already annoyed at subsidizing eggheads, didn’t buy his disclaimers.

Ickes continued to have his own reasons for resenting Hopkins. Nearly every week the WPA encroached further into the territory of the PWA. “We voted millions upon millions of dollars for Hopkins, absolutely blind,” Ickes recorded after one cabinet meeting. By contrast, PWA projects encountered close scrutiny—“with Hopkins exercising what amounts to a veto power,” Ickes grumbled. Roosevelt appeared oblivious to what was happening. “Hopkins seems to sing a siren song for him.”

At temper’s end, Ickes confronted Roosevelt and declared that Hopkins was deliberately driving the PWA out of existence. “I never thought I would talk to a president of the United States the way I talked to President Roosevelt last night,” Ickes recorded. Roosevelt told him to calm down. He did, for a time. But the problem festered.

It came to a head at a cabinet meeting in the spring of 1936. Congress was considering the budget for the coming fiscal year; Roosevelt warned Ickes not to air his grievances against Hopkins in front of the Senate appropriations committee. “It was clear as day that the President was spanking me hard before the full cabinet,” Ickes noted. That afternoon he submitted a letter of resignation.

Roosevelt didn’t reply. Ickes had previously arranged a lunch meeting with the president for the following noon. Hearing nothing from the White House regarding his letter, he wondered whether the meeting was still on. He called Missy LeHand. Yes, she said, the president was expecting him. And yes, the president had read the interior secretary’s letter.

Ickes didn’t know what to think as he entered Roosevelt’s office. A slight smile, but nothing more, crossed the president’s face. Silently he presented Ickes a handwritten memorandum:

The White House

Washington

Dear Harold—

1. P.W.A. is not “repudiated.”

2. P.W.A. is not “ended.”

3. I did not “make it impossible for you to go before the committee.”

4. I have not indicated lack of confidence.

5. I have full confidence in you.

6. You and I have the same big objectives.

7. You are needed, to carry on a big common task.

8. Resignation not accepted!

Your affectionate friend,

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The two men ate lunch, and Ickes went back to work.

31.

AS ESSENTIAL AS THE NATIONAL RECOVERY ADMINISTRATION seemed to Roosevelt and to many of those who participated in crafting its codes, the reconstruction agency was never loved. Businesses chafed at its restrictions and cheated when they could. Labor alleged that the codes favored management and restricted the right to strike. Consumers, who valued the NRA least of all, complained that they paid dearly for the benefits to business and labor. The unspoken secret of the Great Depression was that for those workers who kept their jobs—in other words, for three out of four workers, even at the worst of the long slump—life wasn’t especially uncomfortable. Low prices meant that dollars stretched farther than before. A fundamental purpose of the NRA was to raise prices; to the extent that it achieved its purpose, it hurt consumers. This was one reason Hugh Johnson and the NRA spent such effort on moral suasion, for consumers’ material interests lay precisely in patronizing those companies that undercut the price-fixing aspects of the industrial codes.

Lorena Hickok had rooted for the NRA from the start. But her honesty as a reporter compelled her to acknowledge its shortcomings. “Oh, I’ve kidded myself right along, trying to believe that the codes were working, at least in the big industries—that the textile people, for instance, were complying probably to the extent of 60 percent,” she wrote Hopkins in the spring of 1934. “But I wonder. I’ll bet you right now that 99 percent of American big businessmen are trying to beat them and succeeding. And the little fellows aren’t even pretending to live up to them. They can’t. The whole damned outfit are simply grabbing everything they can for themselves out of improved business stimulated by Government priming and public confidence in the President. They’re not contributing anything.”

The perception of wide-scale cheating encouraged critics who had questioned the advisability or feasibility of the NRA from the outset. William Randolph Hearst lashed the program as “absolute state socialism” and contended that the initials really signified “No Recovery Allowed.” Walter Lippmann asserted, “The excessive centralization and the dictatorial spirit are producing a revulsion of feeling against bureaucratic control of American economic life.”

Hugh Johnson answered the critics, most vigorously. “Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not from paying human labor thirty cents an hour,” he declared. On a separate occasion he likened the recalcitrant to mobsters. “Al Capone was a poor ignorant Sicilian piker next to those rugged individualists who wanted to prolong the dark ages of human relations.” Johnson turned to the Bible to castigate code-cheaters. “We all know the possibility of an Iscariot in every Twelve,” he said. “Even Judas survived for a season—and then hanged himself for shame.”

The president couldn’t fault Johnson’s enthusiasm, but the NRA chief’s behavior became a problem. His drinking may or may not have contributed to his evocative phrasing, but it was no secret among the Washington press corps, who conducted a Johnson self-destruction watch. His assistant, Frances Robinson, had to cover his lapses increasingly often, explaining why her boss was absent or looked so dreadful. He clung to her—figuratively and perhaps otherwise. Meaning to be complimentary, he described her as more than a secretary, which naturally prompted questions regarding how much more. When Johnson complained that these questions were “hitting below the belt,” the speculation simply increased.

Roosevelt finally concluded that Johnson had to go. He took the step reluctantly, fully aware, as Arthur Krock put it, that Johnson was the “complete and perfect buffer”—the one who could be counted on to distract the critics of the president and his closest advisers by saying something outrageous. “When the air around them seemed full of missiles, the General would come along with an incendiary speech to a public audience or a colorful string of threats to a group of stubborn businessmen,” Krock explained. But by the autumn of 1934 Johnson’s erratic behavior became too much of a distraction, and Roosevelt let him know he had to resign.

It was a tearful parting. Two thousand people jammed the auditorium of the Commerce Department where Johnson bade his farewell. Some were NRA loyalists wishing to hear their chief’s final words; many were voyeurs wondering if Johnson would detonate going out the door. The thrill seekers were disappointed. Johnson lavished praise on the NRA staff: “You can treasure in your hearts your part in as great a social advance as has occurred on this earth since a gaunt and dusty Jew in Palestine declared, as a new principle in human relationship, ‘The kingdom of heaven is within you.’” He had expected to outlive his usefulness; the only thing left was to exit gracefully. “The last words of Madame Butterfly, engraved on the haft of her samurai dagger, express my philosophy about this whole business: ‘Con onor muore chi non puo serbar viat con onore.’ Which means roughly: ‘To die with honor when you can no longer live with honor.’”

Johnson’s departure solved Roosevelt’s immediate NRA problem but not the deeper question of industrial planning. From the start there had been confusion as to how long this shotgun partnership of government, business, and labor was supposed to last. Was it an emergency measure, to be phased out as the economy revived? Or was it a long-term undertaking, a permanent transformation of the American political economy? Roosevelt and the drafters of the Recovery Act deliberately fudged the issue by giving the NRA a two-year charter. Two years had seemed an eternity in the frantic atmosphere of the Hundred Days, and it calmed critics who wondered what would become of American free enterprise. But twenty-four months wasn’t long at all in terms of industrial planning, and the uncertainty about the NRA’s future undermined its effectiveness. Businesses that didn’t like it could hope to drag their heels till it expired, and the friction made the expiration more likely.

The NRA’s defenders predicted baneful consequences should the agency die. Ray Moley, no longer on the administration’s payroll but still a supporter of the New Deal, declared that there was no returning to the bad old days of unbridled competition. “We must keep the NRA going,” he said. “Industrial laissez-faire is unthinkable.” The AFL’s William Green concurred. “It is unthinkable on the part of labor that we should go back, after having taken such a forward step in economic planning,” the union boss asserted. John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers remained convinced that the NRA was essential to the welfare of the working classes; the UMW journal called the agency’s establishment “the greatest victory for labor that ever was achieved.”

Roosevelt recognized the liabilities the administration incurred by keeping the NRA alive, but he judged these smaller than the costs to the country of letting it die. “We must continue to protect children, to enforce minimum wages, to prevent excessive hours, to safeguard, define and enforce collective bargaining,” he told a Fireside Chat audience shortly before the NRA’s charter was due to expire. He contrasted the current public attitude with the mood that had existed when he took office, when “individual self-interest and group selfishness were paramount in public thinking.” The mindset of the nation had changed. “More and more people, because of clearer thinking and a better understanding, are considering the whole rather than a mere part relating to one section, or to one crop, or to one industry.” This was a major advance for democracy. The work must continue, and so must the NRA.

CHARLES EVANS HUGHES interpreted things differently. Hughes had come within a whisker of being the last bearded president; his narrow, delayed defeat by Woodrow Wilson in 1916 kept the progressive movement alive for another few years and kept Franklin Roosevelt’s career on track. Hughes’s work as secretary of state during the 1920s—as well as an earlier stint as associate justice of the Supreme Court, from which he had resigned to run for president—recommended him to Herbert Hoover, who appointed him chief justice in 1930.

The NRA was destined to come before Hughes and the high court. For more than a century the court had been ruling on the extent to which government might legitimately interject itself in the workings of the economy. The Marshall court of the early nineteenth century had defined the nature of contracts and defended the commerce clause of the Constitution against state intrusion; the Republican court of the late nineteenth century had limited the applicability of antitrust legislation. During the Progressive era the court reversed itself on antitrust—mandating the breakup of Standard Oil, for instance—and delineated the degree to which the government might limit working hours in the interest of workers’ health and welfare. The strongest and most persuasive voice on the Progressive-era court in favor of letting government look out for workers was Louis Brandeis, appointed by Wilson in 1916 and ever since an advocate of judicial experimentation in tempering the excesses of capitalism. Although Brandeis was personally skeptical of big government, he believed that the courts ought normally to defer to the legislature in matters of political economy. By trial and error Congress could discover the optimal balance between public welfare and private interest.

The NRA was the grandest experiment in political economy Brandeis, Hughes, or any of the other justices had ever encountered. Even the drafters of the Recovery Act worried about its constitutionality. Two issues were most problematic: whether the federal government could intrude so egregiously upon the private sector as the NRA codes allowed, and whether the intrusion, if constitutional, should be directed by the legislative branch or the executive. The case that tested the NRA arose in Brooklyn, where the Schechter brothers bought and sold chickens. The poultry business presented formidable obstacles to the NRA code makers, comprising thousands of small firms operating at the intersection of agriculture and commerce. But eventually a code was pieced together, and Roosevelt approved it in April 1934. Schechter Poultry, like many other small operators, considered the constraints of the code illegitimate and oppressive. The Schechters refused to accept the code and went about their affairs much as before. Their competitors complained, forcing the government to take note. Had the Schechters’ violations involved only maximum hours and minimum wages, they might not have attracted the attention they did, but the brothers were alleged to have broken a rule about what constituted a healthy chicken fit for human consumption. Selling sick chickens was sure to make these small businessmen less sympathetic as defendants, and the feds moved in and arrested them.

They were convicted at trial, and an appeals court upheld the conviction. The Supreme Court, which was looking for a test of the NRA, agreed to review the case. Everyone understood the momentousness of the proceedings. If the NRA was sustained, Roosevelt’s grand experiment in government planning for the economy could go forward; if it was struck down, the country would be thrown back on the rules and expectations of the Hoover era. Donald Richberg, the acting chairman of the National Industrial Recovery Board, special assistant to the attorney general, and a seasoned Supreme Court lawyer, took a chair on the government’s side and presented the case for the NRA. “The NRA law was enacted for the purpose of checking the progressive destruction of industry, to make possible an orderly advance by industry instead of a disorderly retreat,” he said. The depression had provoked a disastrous collapse in demand and prices, with catastrophic effects on wages and employment. Congress had wisely stepped in, under the authority granted it by the commerce clause of the Constitution. Critics of the NRA complained that the industrial codes often involved price fixing, which injured consumers and violated at least the spirit of antitrust laws; Richberg explained that price fixing wasn’t involved in the poultry code or the current case. The fixing of wages and hours was involved, but Richberg contended that such action was necessary to restore order to the poultry industry—as it was necessary in other industries. If Congress could not stop the “vicious cycle of wage-cutting,” Richberg declared, “then it is impotent indeed.”

Joseph Heller, speaking for the Schechters and all the opponents of the NRA, didn’t challenge Richberg and the government on the broad questions of government planning for the economy, but he did question whether the commerce clause applied in the present case. Congress was authorized to regulate interstate commerce, Heller told the justices, but the Schechters did business only in New York. To be sure, some of the chickens they purchased were hatched elsewhere, but by the time the Schechters acquired them they were naturalized New Yorkers, in effect.

To illustrate the picayune character of the poultry code, Heller noted that one of the violations charged against the Schechters was their failure to observe the standards of “straight killing.” He paused to let the justices inquire what straight killing was. A court reporter described Heller’s answer: “He went into a long, detailed, and at times excited description of the process that sent the usually solemn justices into gales of laughter. One after another took the cue and prodded him with questions until it was entirely clear that ‘you have got to put your hand into the coop and take out whichever chicken comes to you first.’” This was to prevent the chicken grabber from favoring one customer over another.

“And it was for that your client was convicted?” Associate Justice James McReynolds asked.

“Yes, and fined $5,000 and given three months in jail,” Heller replied. Heller went on to explain that if a customer wished to purchase half a crate of chickens, he had to divide the crate physically in half and take whatever chickens happened to be in that half. Associate Justice George Sutherland asked what would happen if the chickens all huddled into the other half. Heller conceded that that would be a puzzler. “The court joined in the laughter that followed,” the reporter wrote.

Heller’s fellow counsel, Frederick Wood, seized the moment of levity to reiterate the defense’s contention that the poultry code pushed the commerce clause too far. If the government’s argument was upheld, Wood asserted, the commerce clause would become “destructive of our dual system of government and subversive of our political, social, and economic institutions under the Constitution.”

The justices weren’t laughing—and neither was the Roosevelt administration—when the court delivered its judgment in the Schechter case. By a unanimous vote the court struck down the poultry code and the NRA-supporting arguments on which it rested. Charles Evans Hughes, writing for the court, acknowledged that government authority might expand during emergencies. “Extraordinary conditions may call for extraordinary remedies,” the chief justice said. But the Constitution imposed limits on government, even in emergencies. “Extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power.” Hughes rejected the government’s contention that the poultry codes were intrinsically concerned with interstate commerce. He drew a distinction between activities directly related to interstate commerce and those, like the Schechters’, only indirectly related. If the commerce clause was stretched as far as the government proposed, the chief justice declared, there would be few constraints on federal power. “For all practical purposes we should have a completely centralized government.”

Hughes’s coup de grace against the NRA was a blow at the president himself. The primary complaint of Roosevelt’s opponents during the Hundred Days had been that he was gathering too much power to himself: that the executive branch was usurping the authority of the legislature, albeit with the legislature’s own approval. This was the fundamental finding of Hughes and the eight associate justices in the Schechter case. The Constitution vested federal legislative authority in Congress, and in Congress alone, Hughes said. “Congress is not permitted to abdicate or to transfer to others the essential legislative functions.” Congress had from time to time legitimately authorized the executive branch, working through the Federal Trade Commission and other agencies, to determine fair trade practices. But the NRA codes went far beyond the FTC rules and, in any event, explicitly superseded those rules. “The code-making authority thus conferred,” Hughes concluded for the court, “is an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power.”

THE COURT’S VERDICT against the NRA, and especially the unanimity of the decision, dealt a mortal blow to the New Deal, at least as originally configured. Roosevelt had made industrial planning the centerpiece of his economic policy; the Schechter result negated the premises on which the planning rested. Conceivably Congress could have overseen code writing similar to that of the NRA. But only conceivably, for in the real world of politics, no code with any teeth could have passed muster with the legislature, which would have been lobbied to paralysis by the interested parties. If there were to be codes at all, they would have to be the work of the executive branch. And the Supreme Court now said this was unconstitutional.

Had the decision been close—by a vote of 5 to 4 or even 6 to 3—Roosevelt might have hoped for a reversal before he left office. Several of the justices were nearing retirement, or so he could reasonably expect. He would replace them with men more attuned to his philosophy of government, and all would be well. But the decisiveness of the defeat—even Louis Brandeis voted against the government—made clear that the problem ran deeper than the personnel of the court.

The rejection of the NRA cast the entire framework of American industrial relations into chaos. The seven hundred codes were presumptively illegitimate; the twenty million workers whose pay and conditions the codes covered were thrown back on the mercies of a capitalist marketplace that had treated them badly since the start of the depression. At the time of the Schechter decision, the Justice Department was prosecuting some four hundred cases of code violations. The court’s action compelled Roosevelt to drop the charges and abandon the prosecutions.

The Schechter decision was handed down on Monday, May 27. That same day the Supreme Court, by equally unanimous votes, demolished two other pillars of the New Deal. The decision in Louisville Bank v. Radford overturned the law that furnished mortgage relief to debt-strapped farmers. The verdict in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States disallowed Roosevelt’s removal of a member of the Federal Trade Commission and thereby severely constrained his ability to bring government agencies into line with his policies.

Black Monday, as Roosevelt’s supporters remembered the day of the conservative trifecta, seemed to halt the New Deal in its tracks. The conservatives had contended from the start that the extraordinary delegation of power to the president was not merely unwise but unconstitutional. They had lacked the votes in Congress to prevent it, but now they found the votes where they mattered more, in the Supreme Court. What made the anti–New Deal decisions so frustrating for Roosevelt was that they followed by mere months the New Deal’s ratification by the public, in the elections of 1934.

ROOSEVELT’S FAVORITE president was Andrew Jackson—an odd preference in one regard but natural in another. Jackson’s hard-luck boyhood and orphaned youth could scarcely have differed more from Roosevelt’s privileged upbringing, and the battlefield victories that made Jackson famous lacked any counterparts on Roosevelt’s résumé. Yet Jackson brought democracy to the White House and governed as the first truly popular president, beloved of the ordinary people of America and devoted to their defense and welfare; and Roosevelt could conceive of no higher goal for himself than confirming democracy and serving ordinary Americans.

The Jacksonian model gained even greater appeal for Roosevelt after Black Monday. Jackson was famous for treating Supreme Court decisions as advisory at best. Jackson vetoed as unconstitutional a bill rechartering the Bank of the United States, despite a previous decision by John Marshall’s court specifically affirming the bank’s constitutionality. The fight over the bank became a centerpiece of Jackson’s second administration, prompting Old Hickory to vow to his vice president: “The Bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me. But I will kill it!” When the high court rejected Jackson’s Indian policy in a controversial case involving the Cherokees and Georgia, Jackson reportedly declared, “John Marshall has delivered his opinion; now let him enforce it.”

In each case Jackson believed that Marshall, the last holdout of the discredited Federalist party, was denying the American people their democratic right to discover new solutions to the problems that vexed them. Roosevelt felt the same way about Hughes and the conservative court of the 1930s. Roosevelt noted that the American people had upheld Jackson against the court, and he hoped the American people would do the same for him.

But he had to tread carefully. In Jackson’s day the doctrine of judicial supremacy had yet to take hold. Credible opinions differed as to whether the Supreme Court spoke for the government as a whole or simply for the judicial branch. By the 1930s the question had been fairly well settled, in favor of the former. The decisions of the Supreme Court were construed as the law of the broader view. Roosevelt couldn’t defy the court as openly as Jackson had done and expect to get away with it. He would have to move obliquely.

In a meeting of the cabinet in June 1935 he noted the advantages of lying low. “His theory is that we ought to accept the opinion of the Supreme Court,” Harold Ickes recorded in his diary after the meeting, “letting credit or blame rest where it belongs in that respect.” Roosevelt wanted Americans to know that he needed their cooperation, that he was not “a magician who can pull rabbit after rabbit out of the hat.” Roosevelt didn’t like the outcome of the recent cases, but he recognized the advantages of blaming the Supreme Court for frustrating the will of the people. “He is not at all averse to the Supreme Court declaring one New Deal statute after another unconstitutional,” Ickes noted after a subsequent cabinet session. “He believes that the Court will find itself pretty far out on a limb before it is through.”

MEANWHILE ROOSEVELT addressed a more imminent threat. Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth clubs continued to beguile millions of Americans, and the Kingfish was making convincing noises about running for president in 1936. The Social Security Act dealt with part of Roosevelt’s Long problem, but the insurance approach to old-age pensions that rendered Social Security politically palatable left unaddressed the class resentment that stoked much of the Long craze. Roosevelt sallied into the class war with a sweeping proposal to shift a much larger part of the tax burden onto the wealthy.

“Wealth in the modern world does not come merely from individual effort,” he explained in a message to Congress in June 1935. “The individual does not create the product of his industry with his own hands; he utilizes the many processes and forces of mass production to meet the demands of a national and international market.” If anyone in American history could be called self-made, it was Andrew Carnegie; yet even Carnegie had acknowledged his debt to his fellows. “Where wealth accrues honorably,” Roosevelt quoted the steelmaker, “the people are always silent partners.” The wealthy therefore had a particular obligation to contribute to the maintenance of society. Roosevelt explained how they might fulfill this obligation, in three government-assisted steps.

The first was a sharply progressive inheritance tax. The transfer of great wealth from generation to generation was “not consistent with the ideals and sentiments of the American people,” Roosevelt said. The inheritance tax he now proposed would enhance social equality even as it reduced the national debt.

Roosevelt’s second recommendation was a substantial increase in the marginal tax rates on high incomes. The principle of graduation currently stopped at $1 million, with the result that although a worker with an income of $6,000 paid a marginal rate twice that of a worker making $4,000, an investor making $5 million paid no greater rate than one making $1 million. This arrangement had negative consequences for federal revenues, and even worse results for American morale. To remedy the situation, Roosevelt advocated “very high taxes” on large incomes.

Roosevelt’s third recommendation paralleled his second but applied to corporations rather than individuals. Corporate profits, even more than individual incomes, owed much to government and to society at large, the president said. Government created corporations through charters; government protected corporations through systems of laws; society furnished corporations their labor and their customers. As with individuals, some corporations benefited more than others, and large corporations benefited most of all. Equity dictated that large corporations pay more than small ones. At present corporate profits were taxed at a uniform rate. Roosevelt recommended reducing the rate on smaller corporations by a quarter and increasing the rate on the largest by the same amount.

Roosevelt’s tax message “burst on most of Congress and the public like a bombshell,” according to Arthur Krock. There were cheers in the House of Representatives when the message was read, and cold silence in the Senate. Only Huey Long broke the chill in the upper chamber. “I just want to say ‘Amen,’” he declared for the record, even while calculating what the message meant for his own prospects.

Long wasn’t the only one making that calculation. Roosevelt’s tax plan was widely interpreted as an effort to steal Long’s thunder. “For the time being he has silenced Huey and taken him into camp,” the Los Angeles Times remarked, in an editorial similar to those in many other papers. “However hard it comes, the Kingfish must perforce applaud.” Yet Roosevelt’s tax plan was far from popular across the whole country. Editorialists, including many otherwise sympathetic to administration policies, worried about its consequences. “President Roosevelt made a political masterstroke, even though its immediate effect may be to slow down recovery,” the Kansas City Star declared. Other papers were less kind. “It will aggravate fear and uncertainty in the very quarters where the administration needs support in its re-employment efforts,” the Boston Heraldpredicted. The Chicago Tribune asserted, “The stability of a great office has been lost while its holder scrambles for the support of the least stable element of our population in competition with men known as the leaders of the lunatic fringe.” The San Francisco Chronicle remarked, “Coming at this time, after the President’s defeat before the Supreme Court on his unconstitutional NRA program, the action has the ugly look of a reprisal by a man checked in his course but determined to have his way.”

Appearances aside, there was some question how determined Roosevelt was to get his tax proposal put into law. He hadn’t consulted the obvious members of Congress ahead of time. If anything, he went out of his way to keep them ignorant. “Pat Harrison’s going to be so surprised he’ll have kittens on the spot,” Roosevelt said of the chairman of the Senate finance committee. Harrison’s House counterpart, Robert Doughton, rejected the philosophy beneath the president’s tax scheme. “I don’t subscribe to the soak-the-rich idea at all,” the ways and means chairman said. The speaker of the House, Joseph Byrns, was equally surprised and no more enthusiastic. The president’s tax proposal would go on the “ought” list, rather than the “must” list, he explained. Doughton, who would have more to say about the proposal’s timing than anyone else, concurred. “If we don’t get to it this session, the committee can spend some time on it in the fall.”

Roosevelt himself didn’t seem to be pushing the tax plan. No sooner had he tossed his grenade into the Capitol than he left Washington. Franklin Jr. was rowing on the junior varsity crew for Harvard, which was about to compete against Yale. Roosevelt took the train to New London, Connecticut, for the race, and then spent a long weekend at Hyde Park. By the time he returned to Washington whatever momentum his message had given to the equalitarian forces in Congress had largely dissipated.

Roosevelt’s strategy gradually became apparent. He had no intention of pressing his tax plan on Congress in the current session. He knew Washington well enough to understand that tax codes aren’t rewritten in weeks, and certainly not in the heat of the summer. His purpose was political rather than fiscal. He wanted to demonstrate to the followers of Huey Long that two could play the share-our-wealth game. Perhaps he would pursue his tax code in the next session of Congress, perhaps he wouldn’t. He would be guided by circumstances at that point. In the meantime he had made a statement, which was all he intended at present.

IN THE SUMMER of 1935 it was impossible to know which way the American political economy was headed. Congress was expanding the New Deal, by means of Social Security and the WPA, even as the Supreme Court was contracting it. The president was proposing a drastic revision of the tax code, but he wasn’t exerting himself on its behalf. There had always been an ad hoc quality to Roosevelt’s policies, but now the ad hockery was resembling caprice. Was the New Deal ending or just beginning?

Particular groups especially wanted to know. Roy M. Howard, the chairman of the board of the Roosevelt-friendly Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, sent the president a warning. “That certain elements of business have been growing more hostile to your Administration is a fact too obvious to be classed as news,” Howard wrote in an open letter to the White House. “So long as this hostility emanated from financial racketeers, public exploiters, and the sinister forces spawned by special privilege, it was of slight importance. No crook loves a cop.” But the criticism had lately changed. “Throughout the country many business men who once gave you sincere support are now not merely hostile, they are frightened.” They feared that the president was promoting a tax code “that aims at revenge rather than revenue.” Their misgivings were bad for the administration and worse for the country. “There can be no real recovery until the fears of business have been allayed through the granting of a breathing spell to industry, and a recess from further experimentation.”

Roosevelt gave Howard what he wanted. The New Deal had been a response to a national emergency, he said. Dramatic action, on a broad front, had been necessary. “This basic program, however, has now reached substantial completion and the ‘breathing spell’ of which you speak is here—very decidedly so.”

Roosevelt’s reassurance sent the stock market sharply upward. The New York Times index touched its highest level in half a decade. A veteran reporter covering the reaction to the president’s message explained: “The statement that his basic program had ‘reached substantial completion’ was hailed as highly constructive.”

ON A SLOW afternoon near the end of the congressional session of 1935, Huey Long amused his Senate colleagues and reporters by recounting what he described as a plot to assassinate him. Two of his supporters, he said, had been staying in a New Orleans hotel when they chanced to hear voices in the next room. Whether the voices were unusually loud or Long’s friends singularly acute of hearing, the senator didn’t explain. But the gist of the discussion was that Long would be murdered. Long didn’t appear to take the threat seriously; in fact he treated it as a joke. Those present at Long’s recounting couldn’t decide whether the senator was telling the truth, exaggerating for effect, or pulling their legs entirely.

A month later they remembered his words. On the evening of September 8, Long was walking out of the chamber of the Louisiana House of Representatives in Baton Rouge, where he had been giving orders to local operatives regarding legislation that would consolidate his hold on Louisiana, presumably in readiness for a run for president the following year. A young Baton Rouge physician, Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of one of the leaders of the anti-Long forces in Louisiana, approached the senator beneath the capitol rotunda, pulled a pistol, and shot him in the abdomen. Long’s bodyguards, members of the Louisiana state police, instantly returned the fire, pumping dozens of bullets into Weiss and killing him on the spot. Long survived the shooting itself, the ambulance trip to the hospital, and multiple transfusions of blood, but the damage to his colon and kidney was too great and he died in the early morning of September 10.

Roosevelt issued the requisite statement of dismay and regret. Privately he was relieved at not having to factor Long into his strategy for 1936. Jim Farley, the administration’s vote counter, predicted that if Long had lived he would have polled six million votes for president on a third-party ticket. “I always laughed Huey off, but I did not feel that way about him,” Farley told Harold Ickes. “He was good for that many votes.”

32.

WHEN RAY MOLEY AND OTHERS NOTED THE CHANGE THAT SEEMED TO have come over Roosevelt during the Hundred Days—his greater confidence, his presence, his comfort with power—they were not speaking of foreign affairs. Roosevelt’s boldness in domestic matters was balanced by a diffidence regarding the world beyond American borders. If anything, he appeared to have regressed: from the assertive assistant navy secretary who thought he knew better than Wilson what American security required to a president who scuttled the London economic conference for fear it would complicate his plans to alleviate the depression at home. Roosevelt weighed every action on the diplomatic front for its domestic effects; if an important constituency seemed likely to complain, he moved with care, if he moved at all.

Yet certain issues had to be addressed. Woodrow Wilson’s policy of ostracizing the revolutionary regime in Russia had been popular at the outset, reflecting at once Americans’ fear of the radical politics of the Bolsheviks, the offense most took at the official atheism of the Soviet government, and the damage a few suffered at the repudiation by the communist government of debts incurred by its czarist predecessor. But the ostracism failed to modify Moscow’s behavior, and after the Red Scare waned, after American religion survived its distant exposure to Soviet atheism, and after the depression compelled nearly every other country to repudiate its debts to America, the non-recognition policy appeared increasingly anachronistic. Worse than that, it became counterproductive. American business groups, desperate for markets, agitated for the opportunity to export to Russia. American strategic thinkers, worried about Japan and Germany, hoped to employ Russia as a counterweight to the west of the former and the east of the latter.

Roosevelt leaned toward recognition from the start of his presidency. As harsh as he could be toward certain business groups when it suited his political purposes, he fully understood that exports benefited all classes in America. And, without thinking too specifically about it, he concurred in the belief that an American-Russian rapprochement might give pause to aggressors in Central Europe and East Asia.

From a personal standpoint, Roosevelt had confidence in his diplomatic skills. He didn’t openly boast of his expertise in foreign affairs, although he knew more about the world abroad than any president before him, with the debatable exception of John Quincy Adams. But he was certain he could handle any foreign leader he encountered. He may have been wrong, at least at this stage of his career. Yet having dealt with the likes of Charles Murphy, Herbert Hoover, and Huey Long, Roosevelt couldn’t imagine that Joseph Stalin would be much more of a challenge.

Even so, he proceeded with caution. Political conservatives had largely abandoned their opposition to Russia; in the opinion of Scripps-Howard publisher Roy Howard, “The menace of Bolshevism in the United States is about as great as the menace of sunstroke in Greenland or chilblains in the Sahara.” But American Catholics continued to fret that recognition would signal acquiescence in the suppression of religion in Russia.

Roosevelt invited the leader of the Catholic opposition, Father Edmund Walsh, to the White House. Walsh taught foreign policy at Georgetown University (where the School of Foreign Service would be named for him), and he prided himself on his imperviousness to flattery and political charm. He drew a sharp line against recognition and determined to defend it. Recognition of Moscow would amount to the “canonization of impudence,” Walsh said. “You cannot make a treaty with that evil trinity of negations: anti-social, anti-Christian, anti-American.” But he couldn’t resist Roosevelt. “Leave it to me, Father,” the president said. “I am a good horse dealer.” With what Walsh later described as “that disarming assurance so characteristic of his technique in dealing with others,” Roosevelt convinced Walsh that American interests—and the interests of Christianity and society—were in good hands. Walsh left the meeting having agreed to suspend his campaign against recognition and to encourage other opponents to do the same.

Roosevelt still had to deal with the horses—the Soviets—themselves. Though he knew nothing in detail about the inner workings of the Kremlin, he had to assume, simply as a politician, that there must be forces in Russia that would oppose a rapprochement with the United States for political reasons of their own. He therefore chose to proceed with caution, lest an overture from Washington be rebuffed, to the detriment of American prestige and the embarrassment of his administration.

He orchestrated a meeting in Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s office between the State Department’s William Bullitt and Boris Skvirsky, Moscow’s unofficial envoy to Washington. Skvirsky appeared first. Morgenthau told him Bullitt would arrive shortly with a draft note. “His face lit up with a big smile,” Morgenthau remembered.

Bullitt made his entry on the stage as arranged by the president himself, sat down, and said to Skvirsky, “I have a piece of paper in my hand unsigned. This document can be made into an invitation for your country to send representatives over here to discuss the relationship between our two countries. We wish you to telegraph the contents of this piece of paper by your most confidential code, and learn if it is acceptable to your people.”

If it was acceptable, Bullitt explained, President Roosevelt would sign the note. If it was not, Skvirsky must never speak of the offer or even of the meeting. Still holding the note, Bullitt demanded that Skvirsky give his word of honor to do as required. The Russian promised he would.

“Does this mean recognition?” he asked.

“What more can you expect than to have your representative sit down with the president of the United States?” Bullitt answered.

The representative who sat down with Roosevelt was Maxim Litvinov, an old Bolshevik currently serving as Stalin’s foreign minister. Litvinov was among the more cosmopolitan of the Bolsheviks, having lived in London for ten years before the October Revolution and taken an English wife. But he could be stubborn in dealing with Western governments. “Litvinov and I continued to argue for two hours on the subject of debts and claims,” Bullitt informed Roosevelt after one session. Litvinov insisted that the American claims against the Soviet government were grossly exaggerated, and he refused to budge from what Bullitt characterized as an “absurd” figure of $50 million. As Litvinov headed for the White House, Bullitt urged the president: “I think you should endeavor forcibly to get him to fix at least $100 million as the lower limit.”

Roosevelt, having determined that recognition would serve American interests, decided not to quibble much over the price. He offered $75 million, which Litvinov accepted. After the State Department worked out various details, the deed was done. “I trust that the relations now established between our peoples may forever remain normal and friendly,” Roosevelt said to Litvinov with a handshake, “and that our nations henceforth may cooperate for their mutual benefit and for the preservation of the peace of the world.”

HIS DEFTNESS IN recognizing Russia made Roosevelt think he could accomplish something similar with the World Court. American adherence to the international tribunal should have been uncontroversial. For years the national platforms of both the Democrats and the Republicans had endorsed membership. The American Bar Association recommended joining, as did the American Legion, American labor unions, teachers’ associations, most newspapers, many state legislatures, and hundreds of other organizations ranging the spectrum from the radically pacifist to the soberly pragmatic. The World Court was an arm of the League of Nations, but it didn’t share the principal drawback—in American eyes—of the League: the ability to order member nations to engage in collective security measures. If anything, membership in the World Court would enhance America’s freedom of action by protecting the interests of Americans from legal challenges by foreigners. Only the willfully obstinate, one would have thought, could oppose such a worthy goal.

This was certainly what Roosevelt thought. But having encountered plenty of willful obstinacy during his years in politics, he moved carefully. At a press conference early in the Hundred Days, a reporter inquired whether he would ask the Senate to take up membership in the World Court. The president declined to respond. “Not even off the record,” he said.

His caution persisted through the following year and past the 1934 elections, whose heartening results gave him courage to move forward. The Democrats now controlled five more votes than the sixty-four needed to ratify a treaty of adherence to the World Court, and the president assumed that this margin, combined with his prestige and the broad popular support for membership, as measured by numerous polls, would enable him to carry the day. In January 1935 he put the matter to the Senate. “The movement to make international justice practicable and serviceable is not subject to partisan considerations,” he declared. The growing turmoil in foreign affairs rendered American participation in a central institution promoting justice and stability essential. “At this period in international relationships, when every act is of moment to the future of world peace, the United States has an opportunity once more to throw its weight into the scale in favor of peace.”

Roosevelt expected some reaction, but nothing like what he got. Charles Coughlin, then at the height of his broadcast influence, immediately mobilized his listeners against the World Court. “I appeal to every solid American who loves democracy, who loves the United States, who loves the truth, to stand four square back of those tried and true senators of long experience in their hopeless yet honest fight to keep America safe for Americans and not the hunting ground of international plutocrats,” the radio priest implored. “Today, whether you can afford it or not, send your senator a telegram telling him to vote ‘no’ on our entrance into the World Court.”

Coughlin’s listeners responded, flooding the Senate with more messages than the local offices of Western Union and Postal Telegraph had ever handled. Meanwhile the Hearst papers hammered on the World Court as unable to preserve peace and unwilling to protect Americans. The onslaught of naysaying reinforced the convictions of outright opponents of the court in the Senate and pushed several fence-sitters into opposition.

Recalling Wilson’s failure with the Senate over the League, Roosevelt tactically accepted a reservation offered by Republican Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan reaffirming America’s noninvolvement in the affairs of Europe. The measure had little to do with the World Court, but it satisfied a certain element of the isolationists. Roosevelt initially balked at another addendum, which would require him to return to the Senate for two-thirds approval before presenting a case to the court. “From the strictly constitutional standpoint,” he told reporters on background, “that is a definite limitation of the constitutional prerogatives of the executive which cannot be of any effect.” But he eventually swallowed his scruples and accepted this provision too.

Each concession simply encouraged the opponents. One by one they announced their undying hostility to the World Court, however hedged by reservations. Roosevelt countered by enlisting adherents to speak out in favor. The night before the climactic vote, Eleanor Roosevelt took to the air in an unusually direct effort to influence a political decision. “I am speaking to you tonight as a citizen and as a woman deeply interested in this question,” she explained. A great deal had been said on both sides of the issue, but much of it was irrelevant.

The only real question before us now is whether we want to throw the weight of the United States behind cooperative efforts of nations to develop international law and apply it to the settlement of disputes, or whether we despair of any substitute for war…. It seems to me that we, the strongest nation in the world, can not be afraid to take this step, to make this gesture…. Is it really the spirit of our country, men and women, young and old, that they are afraid to join the World Court? I cannot believe it.

Whatever the feelings of the men and women of America, thirty-six senators voted against the court, killing Roosevelt’s hopes of easing his country toward a share of responsibility for world order. The defeat was a major embarrassment for the administration. In public Roosevelt kept his temper. “Any comment to make on the World Court?” a reporter asked. “Only this,” Roosevelt answered: “That I am very grateful to Senator Robinson for the very able and honorable fight which he conducted, and to the others who supported the World Court.” In private he aired his anger. “As to the 36 gentlemen who voted against the principle of a World Court,” he wrote majority leader Robinson, “I am inclined to think that if they ever get to Heaven they will be doing a great deal of apologizing—that is if God is against war, and I think He is.”

HIS TROUBLES WITH Congress over foreign policy were just beginning. In 1934 the Senate had appointed a special committee to investigate connections between the arms industry and American intervention in the World War. Gerald Nye of North Dakota headed the committee. Nye was a Republican but of the agrarian-radical, business-distrusting type; he had made a name for himself investigating the Teapot Dome scandal and showing how the oil industry had corrupted the Republican administration of Warren Harding. Now, in an expression of bipartisan fair-mindedness, he sought to reveal how the munitions industry had corrupted the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson—and led American foreign policy disastrously astray. That the current Democratic president had been a key figure in Wilson’s Navy Department, a major purchaser of munitions, lent interest to the investigation, as did the increasingly obvious parallels between world events of the 1910s and those of the 1930s.

The Nye committee held hearings and gathered evidence. The witnesses and the evidence revealed that American arms makers had profited enormously from the World War, as had American bankers, whom Nye added to the list of targets of his probing. Nye had no doubt, as he made clear in numerous statements, that the financial interests of the armsmongers and the money men had been decisive in propelling the United States to war. A whole “merchant of death” literature sprang up around the Nye investigations and extended the committee’s findings up to the present. The committee itself eventually published a report condemning the still-standard practices of the weapons industry as “highly unethical, a discredit to American business, and an unavoidable reflection upon those American governmental agencies which have unwittingly aided in the transactions so contaminated.”

The “unwitting” disclaimer was the price of unanimity in the bipartisan report; in fact Nye and many others were convinced that certain American officials were wholly witting in their pernicious activities. And the forward thrust of the report indicated quite plainly the desire of Nye and the committee to shape the foreign policy debate of the mid-1930s. The depression constituted the foreground of the debate; while millions of Americans suffered at home, most of their compatriots had difficulty summoning enthusiasm for crusades on behalf of sufferers elsewhere. The downward-spiraling condition of international affairs formed the background of the debate. Mussolini, after crushing democracy in Italy, was provoking a dispute with Ethiopia over that country’s border with Italian East Africa. Ethiopia sought calm, but the Italian dictator escalated the affair by sending troops to the frontier and ranting about Italian honor. Meanwhile Hitler revealed that Germany had built an air force, in violation of the Versailles treaty, and was reinstituting conscription, toward the goal of creating a half-million-man army. As if his actions didn’t speak loudly enough, the Nazi leader declared the Versailles system dead. The Japanese continued to consolidate their hold on Manchuria and to speak of an Asian version of the Monroe Doctrine, by which they meant that Japan ought to dominate East Asia the way the United States dominated the Americas and that other countries ought to keep out, as other countries generally kept out of the Western Hemisphere.

Americans watched in alarm, but alarm alleviated by satisfaction that the oceans to America’s east and west remained almost as wide as ever. The overwhelming response among the American people was that the United States ought to stay out of other people’s troubles. Convinced pacifists held this view on principle; the much larger group that didn’t reject military action altogether contended that nothing on the horizon threatened the United States directly or would threaten it unless American leaders foolishly let the nation be drawn in. In April 1935 college students across the country staged a “peace strike,” dropping their books and abandoning their classrooms to insist that America eschew war. “Abolish the ROTC!” demanded the signs of strikers at the City College of New York. “Build Schools, Not Battleships!” Albert Einstein endorsed the movement toward world peace, writing in the Daily Princetonian that “the creation of the deeply felt good-will is the first important step to attain that goal.” Reinhold Niebuhr of the Union Theological Seminary proposed a clerical boycott of war, urging his fellow ministers to refuse to serve as chaplains in the event of war’s outbreak.

Congress echoed the calls for peace. Advocates of legislation to ensure America’s noninvolvement in future wars clamored to put their names on neutrality measures. Most looked backward to view the road ahead. Recalling—with the help of the Nye committee hearings—how Wilson’s neutrality of August 1914 had become America’s belligerence of April 1917, the neutralists demanded not simply that the United States remain impartial between the two sides in a war but that Americans abandon their long-standing insistence on trading with the two sides. The weapons trade was forbidden in all the neutrality proposals; particular versions would have jettisoned American loans, American travel on belligerent vessels, or American exports not carried in foreign ships.

Roosevelt didn’t want to have to deal with neutrality legislation. This was the season of Social Security and the WPA, not to mention the Supreme Court’s initial assault on the New Deal. But the world pressed in. “These are without doubt the most hair-trigger times the world has gone through in your lifetime or mine,” Roosevelt wrote Breckinridge Long, the American ambassador to Italy, in early March. “I do not even exclude June and July 1914, because at that time there was economic and social stability, with only the loom of a war by governments in accordance with preconceived ideas and prognostications. Today there is not one element alone but three.”

In public Roosevelt downplayed the threat to peace. His domestic agenda came first, and in any event he knew he’d have trouble restraining the neutralists once he acknowledged the danger abroad.

His diffidence momentarily spared him controversy, but it led to an appearance of drift. “No one today knows what is the foreign policy of our Government,” Key Pittman, Democratic chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, wrote Roosevelt. “Are we going to participate in European affairs, or are we going to keep out of them? Are we going to enforce treaties, or are we going to abandon them? Are we going to be innocent lambs and simply generous in our international trade, or are we going to be horse traders?”

Roosevelt didn’t enlighten Pittman or anyone else. As the neutralists in Congress pressed toward passage of a neutrality law, Roosevelt refused to say whether he would support or oppose such a measure. Even off the record he tried to have it both ways. “We do want and ought to have some additional neutrality legislation,” he told reporters, “but we are faced with a legislative situation at the end of the session. Therefore I said to Bill Phillips”—the undersecretary of state—“this morning, I said: ‘I am perfectly willing, if we can get an agreement on neutrality legislation, so long as it does not block the adjournment of Congress.’” Given Roosevelt’s ambitions for domestic legislation, this tepid endorsement was tantamount to saying he hoped the neutrality bill would disappear.

It didn’t. Roosevelt got the domestic laws he wanted and a neutrality law he didn’t want. The measure he received from Congress mandated that in the event of war Americans would be prohibited from shipping “arms, ammunition, or implements of war” to the belligerents. Roosevelt’s halfhearted opposition had succeeded in getting a certain executive discretion written into the neutrality bill: the president would determine what constituted “implements of war” and whether a state of war in fact existed. Even after winning this concession, Roosevelt toyed with the idea of a veto, but in the end he chose not to fight the clear trend of public and congressional opinion. He put the best face on things in signing the neutrality law. “I have approved this Joint Resolution because it was intended as an expression of the fixed desire of the Government and the people of the United States to avoid any action which might involve us in war,” he said. “The purpose is wholly excellent, and this Joint Resolution will to a considerable degree serve that end.” In the next breath, though, he warned that conditions might change and require a new approach. “History is filled with unforeseeable situations that call for some flexibility of action.”

HAROLD ICKES’S COMBATIVENESS often caused Roosevelt problems. The interior secretary’s running feud with Harry Hopkins roiled Washington, complicated public works policy, and afforded reporters embarrassing glimpses of the administration’s dirty linen. But Ickes’s feistiness sometimes served a purpose. In December 1935 Ickes accepted an invitation to address the Town Hall forum of Detroit. The event began inauspiciously. Ickes had taken the overnight train from Washington but hadn’t slept well; he arrived bleary and worn. The auditorium was actually a movie theater in the Fisher Building, an ornately expensive structure underwritten by pre-depression profits from the company the seven Fisher brothers had founded to make auto bodies for Detroit’s car manufacturers. The lights in the theater didn’t work or simply weren’t turned on. “It was a curious experience talking into a dark cave,” Ickes recorded in his diary. Nor was the audience friendly. “It was a well-fed, well-dressed, prosperous crowd, mainly Republican, I should judge.”

The audience got no friendlier as Ickes blasted the opponents of the administration as narrow-minded men who “either possess great wealth themselves or are little brothers of the rich who abase themselves before wealth in the hands of others.” American democracy found itself challenged by a “cruelly ruthless exploiting class looking to a return to power that will make it possible for them to grow even richer while the masses become poorer and poorer.” These exploiters branded the New Deal a step toward communism. They were lying and knew it, Ickes said. “Communism is merely a convenient bugaboo. It is the Fascist-minded men of America who are the real enemies of our institutions through their solidarity and their ability and willingness to turn the wealth of America against the welfare of America.”

Roosevelt was in Warm Springs when Ickes spoke; he returned to Washington a week later. “Whether or not he read anything about my Detroit speech, he did not indicate,” Ickes recorded after meeting with the president. In fact Roosevelt did know about the speech, but he preferred to act as though he didn’t, partly because praise went to Ickes’s head and partly because Roosevelt didn’t want to be held responsible for Ickes’s particular choice of words.

Yet he endorsed Ickes’s combative approach, for he had determined to wage a fighting campaign for reelection. Events hardly dictated this choice. The depression hadn’t ended, but production, employment, and the stock market were all substantially higher than when he had taken office. More significant from a political standpoint, the national mood was decidedly more hopeful. The reforms of 1935 had pushed the demagogues to the margins, where they still shouted, indeed louder than ever, but precisely because the popular ear had turned away. Roosevelt might have coasted to reelection on a feel-good platform of positive achievement and encouraging prospects.

But he didn’t. Instead of political peace he brought the sword. The opponents of the New Deal were not simply mistaken, he asserted; they were malign. Their motives reflected not a different view of democracy but a rejection of democracy itself. “In March 1933, I appealed to the Congress of the United States and to the people of the United States in a new effort to restore power to those to whom it rightfully belonged,” he declared in January 1936, in what was billed as his annual message but which simultaneously served to kick off his reelection campaign. Congress and the people had responded by establishing a fresh relationship between the American government and the American people. “Our aim was to build upon essentially democratic institutions, seeking all the while the adjustment of burdens, the help of the needy, the protection of the weak.” Sad to say—although Roosevelt didn’t sound sad saying it—not everyone had embraced the new dispensation. The agents of organized greed had opposed it. They had briefly admitted their failure in the wake of the 1932 election and fled the scene of their crimes. But they were back. “They seek the restoration of their selfish power.”

Roosevelt did not identify these evil men by name—lest, perhaps, they defend themselves against his allegations. But he painted their actions in lurid detail. “They steal the livery of great national constitutional ideals to serve discredited special interests…. They engage in vast propaganda to spread fear and discord among the people…. They would gang up against the people’s liberties.” They despised democracy, wishing to impose rule by the rich and few. “Autocrats in smaller things, they seek autocracy in bigger things.” Roosevelt challenged these enemies of the people to state openly what they believed. They cast aspersions on the New Deal, suggesting that it had retarded recovery. If this was their conviction, if they wanted to repeal the signature measures sponsored by the administration and approved by Congress, let them assert as much, that there be an open debate. Roosevelt welcomed the challenge.

Shall we say to the farmer, “The prices for your products are in part restored. Now go and hoe your own row”?…Shall we say to the needy unemployed, “Your problem is a local one”?…Shall we say to the children who have worked all day in the factories, “Child labor is a local issue and so are your starvation wages”?…Shall we say to the unemployed and the aged, “Social security lies not within the province of the federal government; you must seek relief elsewhere”?

Merely asking these questions, Roosevelt suggested, would give the lie to the claims of the enemies of democracy. “Our resplendent economic autocracy does not want to return to that individualism of which they prate, even though the advantages under that system went to the ruthless and the strong.” Rather they wished to capture the instruments of power the New Deal had created. “In the hands of a people’s government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people. Give them their way and they will take the course of every autocracy of the past—power for themselves, enslavement for the public.”

It was an astonishing performance. Presidents typically employed a higher tone in delivering their annual messages; Roosevelt’s was a campaign broadside, and an incendiary one at that. He had guaranteed the largest possible audience by delivering it in the evening, so that Americans could hear it live on the radio (and in so doing completed the conversion of the written annual message into the prime-time spectacle of the State of the Union address). By branding his opponents as enemies of the people, Roosevelt came disturbingly close to the demagoguery not only of Father Coughlin and the late Huey Long but also of the fascists of Europe. To be sure, he intended nothing like the Nazi purges, but by declaring class war in America, he polarized politics as American politics hadn’t been polarized since the Populist era.

The surprising aspect of Roosevelt’s performance was that it was fundamentally nonpartisan. In fact, the striking thing about the campaign of 1936 was how little it had to do with parties. Roosevelt remained a progressive, although by now liberal was the more common identifier for his philosophy. And he understood that progressivism, or liberalism, transcended party lines. There weren’t enough Democrats in the country to have cast all those pro–New Deal votes in the 1934 elections; Republicans had defected in large numbers. Nor by any means were all Democrats liberals. Conservatives controlled the party in the South; to these were added some wealthy Democrats from other regions who were more conservative than many Republicans.

Roosevelt occasionally dreamed of building a new party, one not bound by the prejudices and alliances of the Democratic past. But in his waking hours he settled for reconstructing the coalition on which Democratic power had been based. He was a Democratic president, and he led the Democrats into the campaign. But even to Democratic audiences he emphasized that the true struggle was larger than any party. Five days after his State of the Union speech, he addressed the Democrats by radio on the occasion of their annual Jackson Day dinners. “I speak tonight to this Democratic meeting, to these Democratic meetings throughout the nation, in the same language as if I were addressing a Republican gathering, a Progressive gathering, an Independent gathering, a Farmer-Labor gathering, a gathering of business men or a gathering of workers or farmers,” he said. “There is nothing that I say here tonight that does not apply to every citizen in the country no matter what his or her political affiliations may be.”

Again he raised the battle flag. “We are at peace with the world, but the fight goes on,” he said. “Our frontiers of today are economic, not geographic. Our enemies of today are the forces of privilege and greed within our own borders.” Andrew Jackson provided the model and the inspiration for the contemporary struggle. “Jackson sought social justice; Jackson fought for human rights in his many battles to protect the people against autocratic or oligarchic aggression.” Jackson’s enemies, the autocrats and oligarchs, had resisted him with all the weapons of propaganda and intimidation at their disposal. “But the people of his day were not deceived. They loved him for the enemies he had made.” Roosevelt cast himself as the modern Jackson in summoning all men and women of good faith to join his battle against the narrow, selfish interests: “the small minority of business men and financiers against whom you and I will continue to wage war.”

AL SMITH COULDN’T stand it any longer. The former governor and presidential candidate had kept his differences with Roosevelt to himself, out of loyalty to the Democratic party if not regard for his former protégé. Not that he wasn’t tempted to go public—by certain other Democrats. During the summer of 1934 John Raskob organized members of Wall Street’s Democratic minority to pronounce against the New Deal. The group called itself the American Liberty League, and it was joined by various Republicans. Raskob asked Smith, for whom he had done numerous financial favors, to join, and Smith did. For several months more Smith’s attachment to the Democratic party continued to outweigh his concerns about the direction in which Roosevelt was taking it, but after Roosevelt launched his scorched-earth campaign against wealth and conservatism, Smith decided to fight back.

The Liberty League gathered at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel in late January 1936, a few weeks after Roosevelt’s Jackson Day speech. “The listeners in the dining room, who numbered 2,000 in the aggregate, represented, either through principals or attorneys, a large portion of the capitalistic wealth of the country,” a reporter at the dinner observed. Smith commenced his remarks by reaffirming his party loyalties. “I was born in the Democratic party and expect to die in it,” he said. “It is not easy for me to stand up here tonight and talk to the American people”—his speech, too, was being broadcast by radio—“against a Democratic administration…. It hurts me.” But it had to be done. The president had crossed the line of political discourse by arraying class against class. “It has been freely predicted that if we were ever to have civil strife again in this country it would come from the appeal to the passions and prejudices that come from the demagogues who would incite one class of our people against the other.” The president was attempting to do precisely that.

Smith blamed Roosevelt for ignoring the Democratic platform on which he had been elected in 1932. Where was the balanced budget? Where the reduction in federal spending the platform promised? The platform had pledged to lighten the burden of government upon private enterprise; what had been the reality? “NRA! A vast octopus set up by government that wound its arms all around the business of the country, paralyzed big business and choked little business to death.”

To this point in his talk, Smith’s critique of Roosevelt was standard conservative fare. But as he warmed to his task, Smith’s indictment grew feverish. The New Deal was socialism in poor disguise, he said. “The young Brain Trusters caught the Socialists in swimming and they ran away with their clothes. Now, it is all right with me if they want to disguise themselves as Karl Marx or Lenin or any of the rest of that bunch, but I won’t stand for their allowing them to march under the banner of Jackson or Cleveland.” The choice was plain, at least to Smith. “There can be only one capital, Washington or Moscow. There can be only one atmosphere of government, the clear, pure, fresh air of free America, or the foul breath of communistic Russia. There can be only one flag, the Stars and Stripes or the flag of the godless Union of the Soviets. There can be only one national anthem, the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ or the ‘Internationale.’”

AS THE REPUBLICANS looked toward the 1936 election, they had to decide how much distance to put between themselves and the New Deal. Almost none of the GOP leaders liked Roosevelt’s reforms in principle, but more than a few acknowledged the popularity of certain of them—and if the leaders hadn’t recognized it on their own, the defections in the Republican ranks would have clued them. William Borah—Alice Roosevelt’s paramour, Woodrow Wilson’s foe, and the voice of Republican pragmatism at this point—put the matter concisely. “Unless the Republican party is delivered from its reactionary leadership and reorganized in accord with its one-time liberal principles,” the Idaho senator said, “it will die like the Whig party, of sheer political cowardice.” The people were demanding change, and the Republican party wasn’t giving it to them. “They are offered the Constitution. But the people can’t eat the Constitution.”

Alfred M. Landon agreed. The Kansas governor was the sole survivor among Republican governors of the Democratic tidal wave of 1934. Kansas had always been a curious state politically, from its territorial birth in the blood of the slavery crisis, through the Populist passions of the Gilded Age, and on to the Ku Klux Klan battles of the 1920s. Alf Landon jumped into politics from the oil fields of southeastern Kansas, running for governor in 1932 on a platform of fiscal retrenchment and defeating the Democratic incumbent when a quack doctor, John “Goat Glands” Brinkley, siphoned off some of the rejuvenationist vote.

Though often called the “Kansas Coolidge” for his reluctance to waste either money or words, Landon wasn’t entirely averse to progressive ideas. He had voted the Progressive ticket in 1924, favoring La Follette over the real Coolidge. In his inaugural address as governor he sounded a good deal like Franklin Roosevelt. “Our problems have been intensified by the great industrial plutocracy we have built since the last depression of 1893,” he said. “I do not believe the Jeffersonian theory that the best government is the one that governs the least can be applied today. I think that as civilization becomes more complex, government power must increase.”

Many Republicans had difficulty swallowing Landon’s latitudinarianism; others realized that something like it was the party’s only plausible hope of challenging Roosevelt and the New Deal. The governor skipped the primaries that preceded the 1936 convention. “My fixed purpose,” he explained, “is to keep the party in the best possible shape to win the election.” Landon appreciated that unity was the GOP’s only hope against Roosevelt. William Borah and Herbert Hoover were battling for the party’s soul and perhaps for its presidential nomination. Borah strove to liberalize the party, Hoover to maintain its conservative character. Landon left the fighting to the others, judging that his best chance was to promise to do much of what Roosevelt was doing, only better. “We cannot go back to the days before this depression,” he said. “We must go forward, facing our new problems.”

Landon’s strategy made sense to most Republicans. The strategists among the GOP leadership decided that they needed to bridge the gap between the industrial states of the East and the farm states of the West; midwesterner Landon seemed their likeliest bet. Borah faded, and while Hoover hoped for a draft, especially after the party leaders agreed to let him address the convention at Cleveland, the speech did him more harm than good. The Hoover of 1936 looked too much like the Hoover of 1932, and the delegates decided not to risk a rematch of the earlier race. Landon won on the first ballot, acting as though the nomination had sought him rather than the reverse. To lend verisimilitude to this fiction, he rejected Roosevelt’s example from four years earlier and stayed personally away from the convention. Yet he issued a statement from the executive mansion in Topeka that he intended to wage “one of the most aggressive campaigns the Republican party has seen in many years.”

ROOSEVELT’S RENOMINATION by the Democrats was a foregone conclusion, as was his appearance at the Philadelphia convention to accept the nomination. His speech tolled the same warnings he had been making for months, with a twist appropriate to the convention’s setting in the birthplace of American freedom. He denounced the “economic royalists” of the Republican era as the moral descendants of King George III. These “privileged princes” had created a “new despotism” and fastened it upon the American people. The election of 1932 had been the equivalent of the battles of Lexington and Concord, and the New Deal was the analogue to the Declaration of Independence. Roosevelt didn’t claim infallibility for his program; administrations and presidents made mistakes.

But the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference. There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

Roosevelt kept up the drumbeat during the autumn campaign. He reminded voters of what he had confronted on taking office: the hunger, the homelessness, the fear. He lampooned those conservatives who had been happy for the government to save their bank accounts but now criticized it for the very regulations that kept them whole. He ridiculed charges that the administration wasted money on relief. “Of course we spent money,” he said. “It went to put needy men and women without jobs to work.”

He concluded the campaign, as usual, at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Twenty thousand supporters crowded the building. Eleanor, Anna, and Sara joined him on the platform. With sarcasm honed through months of repetition, he heaped derision on those who had driven America to the brink of disaster. “Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines!” he pronounced. “Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair!” The enemies of the people now strove to regain their power by discrediting what the administration, with the support of the people, had accomplished to undo their folly. The administration had frustrated them, and their frustration redoubled their fury. “They are unanimous in their hate for me,” Roosevelt said. “And I welcome their hatred.”

The crowd erupted. They cheered and stamped their feet so long that Roosevelt had to ask them to be quiet. Gradually they calmed down.

“I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match.”

Another outburst, longer and louder than before. Roosevelt paused for the shouters to fall silent.

“I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”

The twenty thousand exploded in delirious enthusiasm. Their thunder rolled around the hall. The band struck up “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Roosevelt beamed defiantly.

IN 1936 in New York state, gambling on presidential elections was legal, common, and regularly reported in the newspapers. As Americans trooped to vote that November, the published odds favored Roosevelt’s reelection by 3 to 1. A widely noted straw poll organized by the Literary Digestwas forecasting a large Landon victory, but the bookies rejected the forecast, as did the brokers on Wall Street, where the wagering was 9 to 5 in favor of Roosevelt. “Betting commissioners recalled yesterday that the only time the favorite in the presidential election lost was in the Wilson-Hughes contest in 1916,” the New York Times gaming correspondent noted.

The Roosevelt camp was confident. Jim Farley, who had conducted a poll of his own, rounded out the campaign with a memo to the candidate. “I am sending you by special messenger a book which will contain copies of letters from leaders in every state,” Farley wrote, referring to Democratic officeholders, campaign directors, and other influential party members. The letters supported a prediction Farley had made earlier, which had seemed quite bold at the time. “I am still definitely of the opinion that you will carry every state but two—Maine and Vermont.”

Farley got it exactly right. Roosevelt’s 28 million votes constituted nearly 61 percent of the popular tally, the largest portion in American history till then (and the second-largest ever, surpassed only, and narrowly, by Lyndon Johnson in 1964). The president won forty-six states and 523 electoral votes to Landon’s two states and 8 electoral votes. Asked to comment on the outcome, Farley told reporters that the Republican adage that as Maine went, so went the nation, would have to be revised. “As Maine goes,” Farley chortled, “so goes Vermont.”

33.

“THE PRESIDENT SEEMED VERY HAPPY YESTERDAY,” HAROLD ICKES wrote in his diary on November 7, 1936. “He talked a lot about the election and its implications. He spoke of the fact that he has now an absolutely free hand.” Roosevelt and the cabinet pondered how the administration might exercise its new freedom. “There was a good deal of discussion about the Supreme Court,” Ickes recorded. “I think the President is getting ready to move on that issue.” The solicitor general, Stanley Reed, filling in for the absent attorney general, Homer Cummings, noted that Justice Harlan Fiske Stone was ailing. Roosevelt responded, laughingly, that Stone might be sick but Justice McReynolds would still be rendering reactionary opinions when he was 105 years old. Roosevelt nonetheless instructed Reed to proceed as quickly as possible with pending government cases that touched on the constitutionality of the New Deal. “He expects this legislation to be declared unconstitutional,” Ickes remarked, “and evidently looks to that as a background for an appeal to the people over the head of the Court.”

INAUGURATION DAY 1937 came six weeks earlier than inauguration days past, as a result of the Twentieth Amendment, and the weather was as foul as winter could be in Washington. A cold rain drenched the crowds that began gathering around the Capitol and along Pennsylvania Avenue at dawn. The inaugural committee prepared to move the ceremony indoors but consulted with Roosevelt before making the final decision. The president asked whether the crowds were already in place outdoors. Informed that they were, he declared, “If they can take it, I can.”

Roosevelt arrived at the Capitol a few minutes before noon. A half hour later he stepped to the speaker’s stand, holding the arm of James. The rain beat down harder than ever, swirling about the rostrum, soaking the president’s bare head and streaming down his face. From time to time he wiped the water from his forehead and cheeks; he read his speech through rain-spattered spectacles. The previous four years had constituted a revolution in Americans’ moral and political understanding, he said. “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.” In the past four years, the people of America had enhanced the power of popular government and reined in the powers of private autocracy. “They have been challenged and beaten.” But much work remained.

In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens—a substantial part of its whole population—who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life. I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day…. I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

The president remarked this point not in discouragement but in hope. As much as Americans had achieved so far, that much and more could they yet achieve.

We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern…. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Roosevelt, with Eleanor at his side and the rain still pouring down, rode from the Capitol to the White House in an open car. His silk hat collapsed around his ears long before the limousine covered the mile and a half; Eleanor’s wool hat fared only slightly better. He remained exposed to the elements for another ninety minutes reviewing the inaugural parade. He came in from the storm only in time to greet the three thousand guests at the White House reception.

MISSING FROM THE soggy celebration—missing from a Roosevelt victory for the first time in a quarter century—was the person more responsible for those victories than any besides Roosevelt himself. Louis Howe’s health had declined relentlessly during Roosevelt’s first term, till he became effectively bedridden. But the president insisted that he remain at the White House, a member of the family. He ensured that Howe be treated with respect by everyone in the administration, even after Howe’s laboring lungs and faltering heart so constrained his activity as to render his advice uninformed and irrelevant.

Howe conserved his energies for a few pet projects. The CCC he shared with Roosevelt, boasting to all who would listen how “he and Franklin” had planned the conservation corps for years before it became part of the New Deal. He toured the camps with the president when the journeys weren’t too arduous, and he took undisguised delight when, with Roosevelt’s quiet complicity, the young men at various camps named their principal thoroughfares “Louis McHenry Howe Boulevard.”

He shared a project of a different sort with Eleanor. A special bond linked Eleanor and Howe, namely Franklin, who needed them less than they each needed him and who needed them still less the more he grew into the presidency. Yet this only strengthened the connection between the First Lady and the First Assistant. Howe had made a political wife out of Eleanor during the 1920 campaign, and he made a politician out of her after the 1932 election. He applauded her press conferences, and he abetted the political turn they took as time went on. Eleanor nominally ruled out political questions, but she defined politics so narrowly as to rule in much that really was political. She condemned sweatshops and child labor and called for higher salaries for teachers. She lamented the isolationism that tied America’s hands as the world grew uglier and more violent. She took pains to state that she didn’t speak for her husband, but both she and Franklin let reporters infer that she said what he might have said had party and congressional politics not constrained him. “Sometimes I say things which I thoroughly understand are likely to cause unfavorable comment in some quarters,” she explained at one session. “Perhaps you newspaper women”—she still barred the men from her conferences—“think I should keep them off the record. What you don’t understand is that perhaps I am making these statements on purpose to arouse controversy and thereby get the topics talked about and so get people to thinking about them.”

She gave speeches around the country and fielded questions germane, inane, and sometimes intrusive. “Do you think your husband’s illness has affected his mentality?” a listener inquired in Akron. “I’m glad that question was asked,” she responded softly, while the audience squirmed. “The answer is yes. Anyone who has gone through great suffering is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind.” The audience stood and applauded loudly.

She commenced a newspaper column that supplanted her radio broadcasts and magazine writing. “My Day” ran six times a week and was syndicated by United Features across the country. Designed to give readers a glimpse into the daily life of the First Lady, it also gave them a glimpse of her mind and heart. She again avoided the overtly political, but her preferences—for humanity, decency, equality—informed nearly every piece.

She consented to interviews that revealed more of her life than any First Lady had ever revealed. Cissy Patterson—of the romp on the floor of Alice Roosevelt’s house—had taken up writing features for the Washington Herald. Noting that Eleanor had become a model for many American women, Patterson asked where she had acquired her ability to move through “these cram-crowded days” with a “sure, serene, and blithe spirit.” Was she really so calm? “You are never angry, for instance?”

“Oh, no,” Eleanor answered. “I really don’t get angry…. You see, I try to understand people.”

“But when you were young, were you free like this? So free—so free of yourself?”

“No. When I was young I was very self-conscious.”

How the change, then? Surely it was a struggle.

“Little by little, as life developed, I faced each problem as it came along. As my activities and work broadened and reached out, I never tried to shirk. I tried never to evade an issue. When I found I had something to do, I just did it. I don’t know….”

Patterson tried putting words in Eleanor’s mouth. The First Lady was “a complete extrovert, of course.”

Eleanor refused to be drawn. She took control of the interview without another word. “She just glanced up over her knitting needles, with those clever grey eyes of hers,” Patterson recounted. For her readers’ benefit, Patterson concluded, “Mrs. Roosevelt has solved the problem of living better than any woman I have ever known.”

Louis Howe rooted her on. “Eleanor, if you want to be president in 1940, tell me now so I can start getting things ready,” he said, only half jokingly. She didn’t want to be president, but she did want to do some of the things she thought a president ought to do. She read Lorena Hickok’s reports from West Virginia and nearly wept at the tribulations of the poor folks there. She urged Franklin to include money for a homesteading experiment designed to make unemployed coal miners and their families self-sufficient. Franklin needed little urging, having thought and talked of such things since the mid-1920s. He arranged for $25 million to be added to the outlay for relief to get the experiment started. The federal government would purchase land for a small number of villages, where it would build houses and barns and workshops in which the inhabitants would pursue a life balanced between farm and city, between the old and the new. They would grow crops to eat and sell and would manufacture furniture and other light products to use and sell.

Richard Arthur’s farm, near Morgantown, West Virginia, became the site of Arthurdale, one of the first of the experimental communities. Eleanor provided the energy to effect the conversion; Louis Howe pulled the levers of government to make her energy most efficient. The task was considerable, as the government had never engaged in the like and no one knew where the authority resided.

Howe claimed the authority, speaking in the name of the president, and the project moved forward in fits and starts. Howe had no experience building homes, and in his hurry he managed to order pre-built structures that didn’t fit the foundations that had been poured for them. They lacked insulation and were unsuited to winter in the West Virginia mountains. Eleanor wanted the homes to be examples of modern convenience, but making them so threatened to break the project’s budget. “The cost of the thing is shocking,” Harold Ickes wrote. Roosevelt had put the Arthurdale project in the Interior Department, and Ickes had to contend with both Eleanor and Howe. “It worries me more than anything else in my whole Department,” he moaned.

Eleanor considered the cost overruns a forgivable flaw in a noble experiment. She knew perfectly well that the entire budget of the Subsistence Homestead Program, as the administrative parent of Arthurdale was called, was less than Harry Hopkins spent in a slow week. She was consequently pleased when Franklin transferred the program from Ickes’s bailiwick to Hopkins’s. And she contended that if the concept of modern homesteading could be proven to work in principle, the costs would come down with repetition.

The economic costs, that is. The political costs remained high. The opponents of the New Deal castigated Arthurdale as a communist plot, akin to the collectivization campaign then under way in the Soviet Union. Coal companies looked askance at anything that diminished their workforce. Firms that produced items that competed with Arthurdale’s current or prospective output complained of the government subsidies the Arthurdale shops received.

Eleanor ignored the carping and carried on. But she couldn’t ignore the excessive costs. She invested many thousands of dollars of her own money into the project and dunned friends to invest as well. “Mr. Baruch has given me ‘carte blanche,’” she wrote with pleasure after receiving a check from Bernard Baruch, “and says that anything which I want I am to do with the money which he has given us, and that he will stand by for another year.”

In time Arthurdale emerged as a vibrantly attractive community. More than a hundred permanent houses of various designs replaced Louis Howe’s prefabrications. The community farm produced vegetables, fruit, eggs, chickens, and milk. Like the community store, it was organized as a cooperative, with residents pooling their labor and sharing the revenues. A community school instructed children who otherwise would have terminated their education years earlier. Practical arts supplemented book learning. “Over in the school shop you will find a surveying transit that the high school boys made, including the drawing of the leveling glass, and there is a telephone set made by the girls,” a visitor in the spring of 1935 explained. “There are radio sets and amplifier, a testing meter reclaimed from the junk pile and put in order after two weeks’ work, and other apparatus all made by the shop students.”

LOUIS HOWE NEVER saw it. By the beginning of 1935 he had become so weak he couldn’t leave his bedroom. An oxygen tent helped him breathe, but it couldn’t cure him of the tobacco habit that exacerbated his symptoms. His condition grew so dire that his daughter, visiting her father at the White House in March, telegraphed home: “No hope beyond twenty-four hours.” But Howe wasn’t ready to let go. He woke up and demanded, “Why in hell doesn’t somebody give me a cigarette?” His wife, Grace, who had long since learned to live without her husband, joined the death watch at the White House. In August he had to be moved to the Naval Hospital. Roosevelt ordered a special telephone line installed so Howe could remain in contact. The president visited regularly; he and his oldest adviser laid plans for the 1936 campaign.

In flashes Howe could be his old self. “As he talked, with dry twists of humor, the hospital atmosphere faded quite away,” a reporter allowed into his room explained. “Howe, in pajamas gaily striped, made it clear that there was the busy office of the President’s Number One Secretary.” He ordered newspapers and other sources of political intelligence brought to his bed; he drew organization charts, sketched political pamphlets, suggested topics for campaign speeches.

But before the campaign was well under way, he realized he wouldn’t see its end. “Franklin is on his own now,” he said. He died on April 18, 1936.

Roosevelt ordered a state funeral for his friend. He and Eleanor accompanied the body to Fall River, where, amid the rotten snow and bare branches of the Massachusetts April, they laid Louis Howe to rest.

JOHN L. LEWIS considered himself as responsible as anyone else for Roosevelt’s overwhelming reelection victory. The mine workers’ chief had thrown the manpower and money of the union behind Roosevelt, contributing half a million dollars and thousands of volunteers who walked the working-class neighborhoods of America’s industrial cities urging the residents to get to the polls and mark their ballots for Roosevelt and the Democrats.

Lewis, in supporting Roosevelt, was registering thanks for past favors and soliciting future ones. With the judicial overthrow of the NRA, the guarantees to labor of section 7a evaporated. In their place Congress had approved the Wagner Act, which reaffirmed labor’s right to organize and established the National Labor Relations Board to secure that right. The NLRB would oversee workplace elections for union representation, levy penalties for unfair labor practices, and intercede between management and labor when bargaining broke down. Roosevelt could claim little credit for the act, which rightly went to his old colleague from the New York senate, Robert Wagner, but he happily endorsed its aims. “By assuring the employees the right of collective bargaining it fosters the development of the employment contract on a sound and equitable basis,” the president said. “By preventing practices which tend to destroy the independence of labor, it seeks, for every worker within its scope, that freedom of choice and action which is justly his.”

But the Wagner Act provided merely the framework for organizing labor; labor itself had to do the heavy lifting. Lewis took the lead, after an acrimonious split between his United Mine Workers and the American Federation of Labor. For decades the AFL had represented the aristocracy of labor, the skilled workers who were difficult to replace and therefore easy to organize. Unskilled workers remained largely unorganized. Lewis had made a start organizing the unskilled of the mining industry, and he hoped to extend his success to other industries. When the AFL leadership refused to sanction his strategy, he led a walkout—punching a recalcitrant AFL man on the way to the door.

Lewis’s new group, the Committee for Industrial Organization (soon to become the Congress for Industrial Organization), targeted two industries—steel and autos—above all. The steel industry had been the graveyard of industrial organization since the infamous Homestead strike of 1892; a sequel in 1919 confirmed the dubious distinction. The U.S. Steel Corporation earned its nickname, Big Steel, by employing over 200,000 men and producing more steel than the second-largest steel-producing country in the world (Germany). Smaller by comparison—but still larger than most national steel industries—were the handful of firms collectively called Little Steel.

Despite their size and power, Lewis had reason to believe Big and Little Steel were vulnerable. The modest revival of the economy since 1933 had caused the companies to rehire workers, increase production, and anticipate profits for the first time in years. If Lewis and the CIO—working through a subsidiary called the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, or SWOC—could crimp the supply of workers, they could threaten production and jeopardize profits. The companies would be forced to accept the principle of industrial unionism.

Similar reasoning inspired efforts to organize the automobile industry. The oligopoly of Detroit’s Big Three—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—was even more complete than that of Big and Little Steel. The automakers had been equally tenacious in resisting broad-gauged unionization. Ford Motor was especially ruthless in spying on, beating up, and blacklisting any workers who dared to spread the union word on company grounds. Wives of autoworkers frightened their children into good behavior by saying that Harry Bennett, Ford’s head union buster, would come after them if they didn’t behave.

For this reason efforts to organize autos were shrouded in secrecy until a fateful afternoon in late December 1936. On that day the United Auto Workers seized General Motors’ Fisher Body Plant Number One in Flint, Michigan. Their technique was simple: they sat down in place and locked the doors. The tactic was shrewd: Fisher One contained the dies on which a large portion of GM’s car bodies were fashioned. By stopping work there and by preventing the company’s men from entering the plant, the UAW put its hand around the throat of GM production.

The sit-down strike suffered from the minor flaw of being illegal. The workers were trespassers, and naturally the company appealed to the Michigan authorities to remove them. Ten years earlier, or twenty or thirty or forty, those authorities almost certainly would have complied. But the governor of Michigan, Frank Murphy, was a liberal Democrat, a friend of Franklin Roosevelt, and an ally of organized labor. “I’m not going down in history as Bloody Murphy!” he responded to those demanding he bring in the National Guard. “If I send those soldiers right in on the men, there’d be no telling how many would be killed.”

In previous strikes when state officials had hesitated to protect company property, management had taken its case to Washington, where Republican presidents—and such conservative Democrats as Grover Cleveland—had ordered the dispatch of federal troops. But Roosevelt refused to intervene. “What law are they breaking?” the president asked rhetorically of Frances Perkins. “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? Sure, you 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 it as the answer. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime.”

Roosevelt rationed his public statements. “Have you anything to say about this automobile strike?” he was asked at a press conference in January 1937, when the sit-down had stretched into its fourth week.

“I think that, in the interests of peace, there come moments when statements, conversations, and headlines are not in order.”

“Do you plan to intervene in the automobile strike?” another newsman queried.

“I think I have already answered the question.”

“Did you read Mr. John L. Lewis’s statement?” Lewis had promised the support of the CIO in a “fight to the finish” with General Motors.

“I have already answered the question,” Roosevelt replied.

“May that one sentence be directly quoted?”

“Yes.”

So it was, in all the nation’s papers the next day. The president’s one-liner was generally read as a rebuke to Lewis, who hoped for better from the president he had helped elect. But Roosevelt’s mere neutrality revealed the sea change that had occurred in labor relations in America. Even a neutral federal government was far more than labor had grown to expect.

Lewis carried on without the president. After GM’s lawyers persuaded Michigan courts to issue injunctions against the strikers, Governor Murphy told Lewis he had no choice but to enforce the injunctions. Lewis responded with his usual theatricality. “I shall order the men to disregard your order, to stand fast,” he told Murphy. “I shall then walk up to the largest window in the plant, open it, divest myself of my outer raiment, remove my shirt, and bare my bosom. Then, when you order your troops to fire, mine will be the first breast that those bullets will strike! And as my body falls from that window to the ground, you listen to the voice of your grandfather”—Lewis knew that Murphy’s grandfather had been executed for insurrection in Ireland—“as he whispers in your ear, ‘Frank, are you sure you are doing the right thing?’”

It didn’t come to that. The management of GM had no more desire for a bloodbath than Murphy did. After seven years of depression, capitalism was in poor enough repute as it was; to add manslaughter to the indictment against it would have been disastrous. The company extended feelers to the workers’ representatives.

Roosevelt nudged things along. After a briefing from Frances Perkins on the status of the negotiations, he placed a call to William Knudsen, the GM chief. “I know you have been through a lot, Bill, and I want to tell you that I feel sorry for you,” he said. “Miss Perkins has told me about the situation and what you are discussing, and I have just called up to say I hope very much indeed that you go through with this and that your people will meet a committee.” Knudsen hid whatever surprise he felt at receiving the president’s call and responded in what Roosevelt took as a positive tone. The president reinforced the car man’s cooperation. “Fine, fine, Bill,” he said. “Thank you very much, Bill. That’s good.”

Six weeks into the strike, GM accepted the United Auto Workers as the bargaining agent for the employees in the striking factories. John L. Lewis characteristically took credit. A touch of flu constrained his eloquence, but he managed to call the agreement “another milestone on labor’s march.” A GM spokesman said simply, “Let us have peace and make automobiles.”

The conquest of steel came harder. Big Steel took a lesson from Big Auto’s experience, and rather than risk a sit-down strike of its own, U.S. Steel bowed to Lewis’s demand that the SWOC be recognized as the representatives of the steel workers. The company moreover gave the workers a raise and made the forty-hour week standard.

But Little Steel resisted, largely to avoid being sucked under in Big Steel’s wake. Big Steel might pay the workers more and still profit; Little Steel might not. Thomas Girdler of Republic Steel responded to the CIO’s success in enrolling workers at U.S. Steel—three hundred thousand within sixty days of Big Steel’s surrender—by branding the CIO’s organizers communists. The undeniable fact that more than a few CIO members were indeed card-carrying Communists lent plausibility to the charge, but what made Girdler’s opposition more formidable was the weaponry—shotguns, tear gas grenades, billy clubs—he provided to Republic’s security guards. On Memorial Day 1937 Girdler’s four hundred guards squared off against some thousand strikers and supporters at Republic’s South Chicago plant. Police joined the guards as the strikers approached the plant, and a bloody riot ensued. At least ten persons were killed and several dozen injured.

The Chicago violence mirrored trouble elsewhere. Police mortally shot three men outside a CIO office in Masillon, Ohio. Two steelworkers died in fighting at Youngstown. The governor of Pennsylvania declared martial law to forestall bloodshed at Johnstown.

Labor leaders called on Roosevelt to condemn the heavy-handedness of the police and the corporate enforcers. The business classes insisted that he speak out against labor’s excesses. He did both, after a fashion. In a press conference in late June a reporter inquired of his reaction to the recent struggles between labor and management. “I think I can put it this way,” he answered. “Charlie Taft”—the son of President William Howard Taft and chairman of a mediation board that had failed to achieve a settlement between steelworkers and management—“and I agree that in the nation, as a whole, in regard to the recent strike episodes, the majority of people are saying just one thing, ‘A plague on both your houses.’”

“Could you interpret that a little bit, Mr. President?” the reporter followed up.

“There is the old dunce cap,” Roosevelt answered, irritated at being pressed. “Isn’t that perfectly clear? It ought to be.”

“Is that your opinion?”

“It is what we agreed.”

“The majority of Americans?”

“That is what Charlie Taft and I agreed was the general feeling in the country.”

“What are you going to do about the plague, Mr. President?”

“I think that covers it all right…. You can use that direct if you want. ‘A plague on both your houses’—that is what we agreed to.”

Unsupported by the president, the strike against Little Steel petered out. “Though not as yet officially called off, the strike is lost,” a sympathetic journalist wrote in the Nation in midsummer 1937. “To deny it is plain silly.” This reporter, and other observers, blamed the harsh tactics of Little Steel, the complicity of state authorities, and the inexperience of the strike leaders in dealing with the steel industry.

John L. Lewis blamed Roosevelt. “It ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table and who has been sheltered in labor’s house,” the CIO chief said, “to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.”

ROOSEVELT MIGHT have been willing to take a stronger stand on the strikes had he not been embroiled, during this same period, in the biggest mess of his presidency. The trouble, entirely of his own making, began in another news conference, shrouded in greater secrecy than usual. As the reporters filed into his office on February 5, 1937, Roosevelt sat silently behind his desk. “All in,” the assistant controlling entrance declared, closing and blocking the door. The correspondents knew Roosevelt had come from a special meeting of the Democratic congressional leadership and another of the cabinet. They didn’t know the topic of those meetings.

Roosevelt looked about the room, scanning his audience with greater care than usual. “I have a somewhat important matter to take up with you today,” he said. “And I am asking that this message of today”—he held up a sheaf of papers—“be held in very strict confidence until the message is released…. Copies will be given to you as you go out, and don’t anybody go out until that time.”

He laughed, less heartily than was his custom. The reporters laughed with him, uncertainly. One joked, “We brought our lunches.” Roosevelt replied, “I’m glad you did.”

“As you know,” the president continued, “for a long time the subject of constitutionality of laws has been discussed. And for a good many months now I have been working with a small group in going into what I have thought of as the fundamentals of the subject rather than those particular details which make the headlines.” He again observed the audience, to catch their reaction. None said a word; all listened intently, most taking notes.

Roosevelt produced a letter from the attorney general describing the increasing workload on the federal courts and the mounting delays this had produced. “More than fifty thousand pending cases, exclusive of bankruptcy proceedings, overhang the federal dockets—a constant menace to the orderly processes of justice,” Roosevelt read. “It is an intolerable situation and we should make shift to amend it.” The attorney general recommended creating new judgeships at the district and circuit level. But this action, he said, should be part of a comprehensive overhaul of the federal judiciary.

The president now turned to a message of his own, which, as he explained, he would deliver to Congress in less than an hour. Partly reading, partly extemporizing, Roosevelt covered the main points. He explained how the role of the federal courts and judges had evolved during the decades since independence. “For example, from the beginning, over repeated protests to President Washington, the justices of the Supreme Court were required to ‘ride circuit’ and, as circuit justices, to hold trials throughout the length and breadth of the land—a practice which endured over a century.” Roosevelt put down his papers and looked out above his glasses. “I might add that riding circuit in those days meant riding on horseback. It might be called a pre–horse and buggy era.” This joke on himself—his references to the pre–New Deal era as the age of horse and buggy in Republican politics had become a cliché—elicited the laughter he expected. “That is not in the message,” he added, to more laughter.

He returned to his text. He noted that the composition of the federal courts had been in frequent flux since 1789. The Supreme Court, for instance, had been established with six members; it shrank to five in 1801; it expanded to seven in 1807; it grew to nine in 1837 and ten in 1863; it fell back to seven in 1866; it returned to nine in 1869.

By now it was clear where Roosevelt was going, and the reporters sat absolutely still, listening intently for the first airing of what certainly would be a radical proposal. “At the present time the Supreme Court is laboring under a heavy burden,” the president declared. The workload was clogging the channels of justice. The high court was compelled to decline to hear the great majority of the cases presented to it. Part of the problem—not simply for the Supreme Court but for the federal courts in general—was the inadequate numbers of judges. But part involved the fact that the judges held office for life. “This brings forward the question of aged or infirm judges—a subject of delicacy and yet one which requires frank discussion,” Roosevelt said. Until 1869, federal judges had received no pensions. As their modest salaries left little for saving, most judges had had no alternative to working “to the very edge of the grave.” Roosevelt looked up. “I am talking about 1869,” he said, to laughter. Congress in 1869 had passed a pension law making it possible for judges to retire with financial dignity. But many didn’t retire, preferring to remain on the job. The legislators who had drafted the pension law were surprised. “It was then proposed that when a judge refused to retire upon reaching the age of seventy, an additional judge should be appointed to assist in the work of the court.” The proposal passed the House but failed in the Senate. The situation festered until 1919, when a new law was passed providing that the president could appoint additional district and circuit judges upon determining that incumbent judges over seventy were unable to discharge their duties on account of mental or physical impairment. But this law had proved ineffective, for the obvious reason. “No president should be asked to determine the ability or disability of any particular judge,” Roosevelt observed.

The problem remained. It was more subtle than most people realized. Modern jurisprudence involved immense complexities, Roosevelt said. Judges had to be at the top of their game. And they had to be sensitive to changing social, economic, and scientific conditions. Older judges sometimes couldn’t keep up. “Little by little, new facts become blurred through old glasses fitted, as it were, for the needs of another generation; older men, assuming that the scene is the same as it was in the past, cease to explore or inquire into the present or the future.” This truth was recognized in most areas of employment, by the government no less than in private industry. Civil servants had to retire at seventy. Military and naval officers had to retire at sixty-four. Several states required judges to retire at specific ages. Federal judges, almost alone, were exempt, to the detriment of their performance. Roosevelt proposed to remedy the situation by “a constant and systematic addition of younger blood,” which would “vitalize the courts and better equip them to recognize and apply the essential concepts of justice in the light of the needs and the facts of an ever-changing world.”

Roosevelt recommended that Congress pass legislation “providing for the appointment of additional judges in all federal courts, without exception, where there are incumbent judges of retirement age who do not choose to retire or to resign.” Though Roosevelt deliberately didn’t emphasize it, the journalists in the room understood that his phrase “without exception” contained the sum of his proposal: he intended to alter the makeup of the Supreme Court. Some of the reporters doubtless looked to the door, instinctively wanting to be the first to file this stunning story. But the door remained closed and guarded.

Roosevelt continued: “If an elder judge is not in fact incapacitated, only good can come from the presence of an additional judge in the crowded state of the dockets. If the capacity of an elder judge is in fact impaired, the appointment of an additional judge is indispensable. This seems to be a truth which cannot be contradicted.” His recommendation raised no issue of constitutional law. No judge or justice would be compelled to resign. In fact, those who remained on the court beyond retirement age would be able to do so more easily—that is, with less workload and strain—than at present. The nation would benefit from their wisdom and experience.

Roosevelt grew more specific in describing his proposal. When a federal judge who had served ten years reached the age of seventy years and six months and did not retire, the president would nominate an additional judge to that jurist’s court. The nominations would require the consent of the Senate, just as at present. In the case of the Supreme Court, the high tribunal would never have more than fifteen justices.

Roosevelt wrapped up the session. “That is about all in the act. The rest is technical. And that is all the news.”

A reporter asked whether he would read the message himself or have it delivered.

“It will be read in about half an hour.”

“Mr. President, this question is for background, but is this intended to take care of cases where the appointee has lost mental capacity to resign?” Nervous laughter rippled among the reporters.

“That is all,” Roosevelt said.

“Was that the reason for the special cabinet meeting?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us what the reaction was this morning?”

“There was no discussion.”

THERE WAS A great deal of discussion after Roosevelt’s proposal was read to Congress. In fact, nothing he ever said or did provoked such an outpouring. Newspapers around the country weighed in at once, nearly all negatively. The Hartford Courant lamented the “disguise of sophistry” under which Roosevelt forwarded his plan. The Baltimore Sun asserted, “To put it conservatively, Mr. Roosevelt has been disingenuous with the people.” The Des Moines Register warned, “No matter how great and good a man may be, executive aggrandizement is not safe for democracy.” The New York Herald Tribune predicted that the president’s scheme would “end the American state as it has existed throughout the long years of its life.” The Los Angeles Times called Roosevelt’s plan “a program of almost devilish ingenuity,” one aimed at “making Congress and the Chief Executive the masters of the nation instead of its servants.” The San Francisco Chronicle described the president’s message as “an open declaration of war on the Supreme Court.” The Chronicle went on to say, “By his own choice, Mr. Roosevelt’s second political honeymoon is over. He has raised an issue which he knows will invoke an opposition as implacable as is his own purpose. On it he invites a fight to the finish. Inevitably he will get it.”

Other organizations and individuals delivered similar verdicts. Church groups condemned the proposal as putting religious freedoms at risk. State bar associations deemed it an attack on the rule of law. A former president of the American Bar Association labeled the court-reform plan a “shortcut to dictatorship.” The Women’s Press Club voted a resolution opposing it. Columnist Dorothy Parker declared, “If the American people accept this last audacity of the President without letting out a yell to high heaven, they have ceased to be jealous of their liberties and are ripe for ruin.” Amos Pinchot, a Progressive partner of Theodore Roosevelt from 1912, published an open letter to Congress asserting, “If Congress passes this bill, or any bill like it, it will have taken a long and perhaps irrevocable step into dictatorship…. The duty of Congress now, its one great chance for service, is to keep Mr. Roosevelt from destroying democracy and setting up personal government in its place.”

Congress heard its duty from many others besides Pinchot. Letters and telegrams flooded into the Capitol mailroom by the hundreds of thousands. No one kept a tally, but the overwhelming sentiment was clearly against Roosevelt’s plan. Maury Maverick, a Democratic congressman and Roosevelt loyalist from Texas, conceded the point in explaining it away. “All that this uproar in the mailbags means is that the Literary Digest voters are trying to conduct another election,” Maverick said.

The response of most of the other legislators was more subdued yet no less significant. Democratic leaders were miffed that the president hadn’t consulted them ahead of taking such a momentous step. He merely informed them in the meeting the day he sent the message up. The lawmakers understood Roosevelt’s reasoning—he knew they would try to talk him out of his proposal—but this simply made matters worse. Kentucky senator Alben W. Barkley complained that Roosevelt was a “poor quarterback” on the court plan. “He didn’t give us the signals in advance of the play.” House judiciary committee chairman Hatton Summers, whose support would be essential to the president’s proposal, told fellow Texan John Nance Garner and others in the vice president’s car, en route from the White House meeting back to the Capitol, “Boys, here’s where I cash in.”

The Democratic rank and file were hardly more enthusiastic. Congressman Edward Cox of Georgia reflected the shock and disappointment of many in his party. “Living within the presence of the fine things which the president has accomplished, it is difficult to withhold from him a power which he wants,” Cox said. “But his recommendation that the membership of the Supreme Court be increased from nine to fifteen, thereby enabling him, through willing appointees, to change the meaning of our basic laws and our whole system of government, asks for something which no man in all this world ought to enjoy. The recommendation constitutes the most terrible threat to constitutional government that has arisen in the entire history of the country.”

Recognizing, after the fact, the need to bring the Democratic leadership around, Roosevelt invited several influential senators to the White House. The meeting simply made the battle lines clearer. Carter Glass of Virginia called the court plan “frightful.” Edward Burke of Nebraska said, “I would rather be right than agree with the president,” and vowed to use “every bit of energy I possess to defeat the proposal.” Burton Wheeler of Montana, who had supported Roosevelt on the substance of nearly all his reforms, drew the line at this attack on the Supreme Court. “The usurpation of the legislative functions by the courts should be stopped,” Wheeler said. “But to give to the executive the power to control the judiciary is not giving the law-making power back to that branch of the government to which it rightfully belongs, but rather is increasing the danger inherent in the concentration of power in any one branch of the government.”

Unsupported in Congress, Roosevelt turned to the people. He had always known the people would be his best bet. He had waited until after the 1936 election precisely to have the people at his back. His appeals to the memory of Andrew Jackson had been made with the people in mind. They understood democracy; they had supported the New Deal; they would rally to him now. All that was necessary was for him to frame the issue in terms the people could understand.

Naturally he took to the radio, in a Fireside Chat on March 9. “I am reminded of that evening in March, four years ago, when I made my first radio report to you,” he said. The country had been in crisis, but Congress and the executive branch had moved swiftly. The economic recovery that ensued, and that continued, demonstrated how prudent and effective the New Deal measures had been. Yet they hadn’t gone unchallenged. The Supreme Court had reversed some of the most important reforms, and it narrowly circumscribed others. Roosevelt likened the American government to a three-horse team, consisting of Congress, the presidency, and the courts. “Two of the horses are pulling in unison today; the third is not.” Critics of court reform contended that the president was trying to drive the team. He was not, because he wasn’t the driver. “It is the American people themselves who are in the driver’s seat…. It is the American people themselves who expect the third horse to pull in unison with the other two.”

The judicial branch, the Supreme Court in particular, was the one pulling in the wrong direction, against democracy and the will of the people, Roosevelt said. It had gone beyond the Constitution in doing so. The people’s representatives in Congress had passed laws to protect the people and secure their prosperity, but the court had struck them down. The recovery program of the administration was in jeopardy, but so was the very structure of American democracy. The people must respond, on their own behalf and on behalf of democracy. “We must take action to save the Constitution from the court and the court from itself.”

Critics had labeled the administration’s proposal an effort to “pack” the court, Roosevelt said.

If by that phrase “packing the court” it is charged that I wish to place on the bench spineless puppets who would disregard the law and would decide specific cases as I wished them to be decided, I make this answer: that no president fit for his office would appoint, and no Senate of honorable men fit for their office would confirm, that kind of appointees to the Supreme Court.

But if by that phrase the charge is made that I would appoint and the Senate would confirm justices worthy to sit beside present members of the court who understand those modern conditions, that I will appoint justices who will not undertake to override the judgment of the Congress on legislative policy, that I will appoint justices who will act as justices and not as legislators—if the appointment of such justices can be called “packing the Courts,” then I say that I and with me the vast majority of the American people favor doing just that thing—now.

FOR ONCE THE Roosevelt wizardry failed. The American people were unmoved by the president’s appeal. George Gallup had begun conducting public opinion surveys just as the New Deal was being born; not long after Roosevelt unveiled his court plan, the pollster asked people what they thought of it. A majority disapproved, and the majority grew—from 51 percent to 59 percent—the more voters heard and thought about it. No less significantly, the polling revealed that the unpopularity of the court plan was damaging voters’ regard for Roosevelt himself. In February, before he announced his court plan, the president had received a favorable rating from 65 percent of respondents; this number slid to 60 percent amid the furor over the court. Fortune magazine asked voters if they would support Roosevelt for a third term. The portion answering positively fell from 53 percent to 45 percent.

Heretofore Roosevelt had been able to count on popular support when Congress hesitated, and that popular support had typically caused Congress to fall in line. Now the dynamic worked in reverse: the popular disaffection with Roosevelt’s court plan gave courage to those senators and representatives who opposed it. They stood firm and refused to reconsider.

Yet Roosevelt’s effort wasn’t without avail. Perhaps Owen Roberts would have changed his mind about the constitutionality of certain New Deal legislation even without the sword of Roosevelt’s reform plan hanging over the court’s head. Evidence indicates that the conversion of the associate justice, who had voted against the New Deal previously, began before Roosevelt revealed his reform design. But the conversion certainly occurred after the 1936 electoral landslide, which got the attention of all the justices. In any event, the Supreme Court decided in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, on March 29, 1937, that a Washington state minimum wage law was constitutional. The vote was 5 to 4, and the fifth vote was that of Roberts, who had voted the opposite way in a nearly identical case from New York just the previous session.

Roberts’s reversal, which brought the court and therefore the Constitution to the side of the New Deal, amounted to “the greatest constitutional somersault in history,” in the words of an amazed but approving Maury Maverick. “Owen Roberts, one single human being, had amended the Constitution of the United States by nodding his head instead of shaking it,” the Texas congressman continued. “The lives of millions were changed by this nod.” The identity of the punster who called Roberts’s conversion “the switch in time that saved nine” has been lost to memory, but the formula stuck, for it captured both the change on the court and the fact that the change deprived Roosevelt of his reason for reforming the court. A follow-on decision in April, by the same five-justice majority, upholding the Wagner Act, confirmed the change and further eroded Roosevelt’s argument for adding justices.

The president let the court plan die, to the immense relief of most of his party. But the whole affair cast him in an unfavorable light. In presenting the plan he tried to cloak his real motives and fooled no one. In failing to get the reform through Congress, he cost himself the invincibility that had seemed to surround him since March 1933 and that the 1936 election had only intensified.

The irony of the court scheme was that the very effort by which Roosevelt secured the New Deal judicially ruined his chances of expanding the New Deal politically. Conservatives had been waiting for the clever Roosevelt to outfox himself; merely months into his second term, he seemed to have done just that. No one was ready to write him off, but few expected anything truly original or consequential from the rest of his presidency.