Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (53 page)

T
ECHNICALLY 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.”

B
Y 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.”