Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (89 page)

Roosevelt’s tax message “burst on most of Congress and the public like a bombshell,” according to Arthur Krock. There were cheers in the House of Representatives when the message was read, and cold silence in the Senate. Only Huey Long broke the chill in the upper chamber. “I just want to say ‘Amen,’” he declared for the record, even while calculating what the message meant for his own prospects.

Long wasn’t the only one making that calculation. Roosevelt’s tax plan was widely interpreted as an effort to steal Long’s thunder. “For the time being he has silenced Huey and taken him into camp,” the
Los Angeles Times
remarked, in an editorial similar to those in many other papers. “However hard it comes, the Kingfish must perforce applaud.” Yet Roosevelt’s tax plan was far from popular across the whole country. Editorialists, including many otherwise sympathetic to administration policies, worried about its consequences. “President Roosevelt made a political masterstroke, even though its immediate effect may be to slow down recovery,” the
Kansas City Star
declared. Other papers were less kind. “It will aggravate fear and uncertainty in the very quarters where the administration needs support in its re-employment efforts,” the
Boston Herald
predicted. The
Chicago Tribune
asserted, “The stability of a great office has been lost while its holder scrambles for the support of the least stable element of our population in competition with men known as the leaders of the lunatic fringe.” The
San Francisco Chronicle
remarked, “Coming at this time, after the President’s defeat before the Supreme Court on his unconstitutional NRA program, the action has the ugly look of a reprisal by a man checked in his course but determined to have his way.”

Appearances aside, there was some question how determined Roosevelt was to get his tax proposal put into law. He hadn’t consulted the obvious members of Congress ahead of time. If anything, he went out of his way to keep them ignorant. “Pat Harrison’s going to be so surprised he’ll have kittens on the spot,” Roosevelt said of the chairman of the Senate finance committee. Harrison’s House counterpart, Robert Doughton, rejected the philosophy beneath the president’s tax scheme. “I don’t subscribe to the soak-the-rich idea at all,” the ways and means chairman said. The speaker of the House, Joseph Byrns, was equally surprised and no more enthusiastic. The president’s tax proposal would go on the “ought” list, rather than the “must” list, he explained. Doughton, who would have more to say about the proposal’s timing than anyone else, concurred. “If we don’t get to it this session, the committee can spend some time on it in the fall.”

Roosevelt himself didn’t seem to be pushing the tax plan. No sooner had he tossed his grenade into the Capitol than he left Washington. Franklin Jr. was rowing on the junior varsity crew for Harvard, which was about to compete against Yale. Roosevelt took the train to New London, Connecticut, for the race, and then spent a long weekend at Hyde Park. By the time he returned to Washington whatever momentum his message had given to the equalitarian forces in Congress had largely dissipated.

Roosevelt’s strategy gradually became apparent. He had no intention of pressing his tax plan on Congress in the current session. He knew Washington well enough to understand that tax codes aren’t rewritten in weeks, and certainly not in the heat of the summer. His purpose was political rather than fiscal. He wanted to demonstrate to the followers of Huey Long that two could play the share-our-wealth game. Perhaps he would pursue his tax code in the next session of Congress, perhaps he wouldn’t. He would be guided by circumstances at that point. In the meantime he had made a statement, which was all he intended at present.

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1935 it was impossible to know which way the American political economy was headed. Congress was expanding the New Deal, by means of Social Security and the WPA, even as the Supreme Court was contracting it. The president was proposing a drastic revision of the tax code, but he wasn’t exerting himself on its behalf. There had always been an ad hoc quality to Roosevelt’s policies, but now the ad hockery was resembling caprice. Was the New Deal ending or just beginning?

Particular groups especially wanted to know. Roy M. Howard, the chairman of the board of the Roosevelt-friendly Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, sent the president a warning. “That certain elements of business have been growing more hostile to your Administration is a fact too obvious to be classed as news,” Howard wrote in an open letter to the White House. “So long as this hostility emanated from financial racketeers, public exploiters, and the sinister forces spawned by special privilege, it was of slight importance. No crook loves a cop.” But the criticism had lately changed. “Throughout the country many business men who once gave you sincere support are now not merely hostile, they are frightened.” They feared that the president was promoting a tax code “that aims at revenge rather than revenue.” Their misgivings were bad for the administration and worse for the country. “There can be no real recovery until the fears of business have been allayed through the granting of a breathing spell to industry, and a recess from further experimentation.”

Roosevelt gave Howard what he wanted. The New Deal had been a response to a national emergency, he said. Dramatic action, on a broad front, had been necessary. “This basic program, however, has now reached substantial completion and the ‘breathing spell’ of which you speak is here—very decidedly so.”

Roosevelt’s reassurance sent the stock market sharply upward. The
New York Times
index touched its highest level in half a decade. A veteran reporter covering the reaction to the president’s message explained: “The statement that his basic program had ‘reached substantial completion’ was hailed as highly constructive.”

O
N A SLOW
afternoon near the end of the congressional session of 1935, Huey Long amused his Senate colleagues and reporters by recounting what he described as a plot to assassinate him. Two of his supporters, he said, had been staying in a New Orleans hotel when they chanced to hear voices in the next room. Whether the voices were unusually loud or Long’s friends singularly acute of hearing, the senator didn’t explain. But the gist of the discussion was that Long would be murdered. Long didn’t appear to take the threat seriously; in fact he treated it as a joke. Those present at Long’s recounting couldn’t decide whether the senator was telling the truth, exaggerating for effect, or pulling their legs entirely.

A month later they remembered his words. On the evening of September 8, Long was walking out of the chamber of the Louisiana House of Representatives in Baton Rouge, where he had been giving orders to local operatives regarding legislation that would consolidate his hold on Louisiana, presumably in readiness for a run for president the following year. A young Baton Rouge physician, Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of one of the leaders of the anti-Long forces in Louisiana, approached the senator beneath the capitol rotunda, pulled a pistol, and shot him in the abdomen. Long’s bodyguards, members of the Louisiana state police, instantly returned the fire, pumping dozens of bullets into Weiss and killing him on the spot. Long survived the shooting itself, the ambulance trip to the hospital, and multiple transfusions of blood, but the damage to his colon and kidney was too great and he died in the early morning of September 10.

Roosevelt issued the requisite statement of dismay and regret. Privately he was relieved at not having to factor Long into his strategy for 1936. Jim Farley, the administration’s vote counter, predicted that if Long had lived he would have polled six million votes for president on a third-party ticket. “I always laughed Huey off, but I did not feel that way about him,” Farley told Harold Ickes. “He was good for that many votes.”

32.

W
HEN
R
AY
M
OLEY AND OTHERS NOTED THE CHANGE THAT SEEMED TO
have come over Roosevelt during the Hundred Days—his greater confidence, his presence, his comfort with power—they were not speaking of foreign affairs. Roosevelt’s boldness in domestic matters was balanced by a diffidence regarding the world beyond American borders. If anything, he appeared to have regressed: from the assertive assistant navy secretary who thought he knew better than Wilson what American security required to a president who scuttled the London economic conference for fear it would complicate his plans to alleviate the depression at home. Roosevelt weighed every action on the diplomatic front for its domestic effects; if an important constituency seemed likely to complain, he moved with care, if he moved at all.

Yet certain issues had to be addressed. Woodrow Wilson’s policy of ostracizing the revolutionary regime in Russia had been popular at the outset, reflecting at once Americans’ fear of the radical politics of the Bolsheviks, the offense most took at the official atheism of the Soviet government, and the damage a few suffered at the repudiation by the communist government of debts incurred by its czarist predecessor. But the ostracism failed to modify Moscow’s behavior, and after the Red Scare waned, after American religion survived its distant exposure to Soviet atheism, and after the depression compelled nearly every other country to repudiate its debts to America, the non-recognition policy appeared increasingly anachronistic. Worse than that, it became counterproductive. American business groups, desperate for markets, agitated for the opportunity to export to Russia. American strategic thinkers, worried about Japan and Germany, hoped to employ Russia as a counterweight to the west of the former and the east of the latter.

Roosevelt leaned toward recognition from the start of his presidency. As harsh as he could be toward certain business groups when it suited his political purposes, he fully understood that exports benefited all classes in America. And, without thinking too specifically about it, he concurred in the belief that an American-Russian rapprochement might give pause to aggressors in Central Europe and East Asia.

From a personal standpoint, Roosevelt had confidence in his diplomatic skills. He didn’t openly boast of his expertise in foreign affairs, although he knew more about the world abroad than any president before him, with the debatable exception of John Quincy Adams. But he was certain he could handle any foreign leader he encountered. He may have been wrong, at least at this stage of his career. Yet having dealt with the likes of Charles Murphy, Herbert Hoover, and Huey Long, Roosevelt couldn’t imagine that Joseph Stalin would be much more of a challenge.

Even so, he proceeded with caution. Political conservatives had largely abandoned their opposition to Russia; in the opinion of Scripps-Howard publisher Roy Howard, “The menace of Bolshevism in the United States is about as great as the menace of sunstroke in Greenland or chilblains in the Sahara.” But American Catholics continued to fret that recognition would signal acquiescence in the suppression of religion in Russia.

Roosevelt invited the leader of the Catholic opposition, Father Edmund Walsh, to the White House. Walsh taught foreign policy at Georgetown University (where the School of Foreign Service would be named for him), and he prided himself on his imperviousness to flattery and political charm. He drew a sharp line against recognition and determined to defend it. Recognition of Moscow would amount to the “canonization of impudence,” Walsh said. “You cannot make a treaty with that evil trinity of negations: anti-social, anti-Christian, anti-American.” But he couldn’t resist Roosevelt. “Leave it to me, Father,” the president said. “I am a good horse dealer.” With what Walsh later described as “that disarming assurance so characteristic of his technique in dealing with others,” Roosevelt convinced Walsh that American interests—and the interests of Christianity and society—were in good hands. Walsh left the meeting having agreed to suspend his campaign against recognition and to encourage other opponents to do the same.