Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (56 page)

J
AMES
R
OOSEVELT
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.

H
ERBERT
H
OOVER
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.

I
T 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.