Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (79 page)

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.

R
OOSEVELT 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 66
²
/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.”

J
OHN
L. L
EWIS
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.”