Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (54 page)

H
ERBERT
H
OOVER
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.”

T
HE 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.”

T
HE
B
ONUS
A
RMY
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.”