Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (50 page)

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.

W
HILE 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.”

T
HE 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.”

L
IPPMANN’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.”