Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (95 page)

Roosevelt rationed his public statements. “Have you anything to say about this automobile strike?” he was asked at a press conference in January 1937, when the sit-down had stretched into its fourth week.

“I think that, in the interests of peace, there come moments when statements, conversations, and headlines are not in order.”

“Do you plan to intervene in the automobile strike?” another newsman queried.

“I think I have already answered the question.”

“Did you read Mr. John L. Lewis’s statement?” Lewis had promised the support of the CIO in a “fight to the finish” with General Motors.

“I have already answered the question,” Roosevelt replied.

“May that one sentence be directly quoted?”

“Yes.”

So it was, in all the nation’s papers the next day. The president’s one-liner was generally read as a rebuke to Lewis, who hoped for better from the president he had helped elect. But Roosevelt’s mere neutrality revealed the sea change that had occurred in labor relations in America. Even a neutral federal government was far more than labor had grown to expect.

Lewis carried on without the president. After GM’s lawyers persuaded Michigan courts to issue injunctions against the strikers, Governor Murphy told Lewis he had no choice but to enforce the injunctions. Lewis responded with his usual theatricality. “I shall order the men to disregard your order, to stand fast,” he told Murphy. “I shall then walk up to the largest window in the plant, open it, divest myself of my outer raiment, remove my shirt, and bare my bosom. Then, when you order your troops to fire, mine will be the first breast that those bullets will strike! And as my body falls from that window to the ground, you listen to the voice of your grandfather”—Lewis knew that Murphy’s grandfather had been executed for insurrection in Ireland—“as he whispers in your ear, ‘Frank, are you sure you are doing the right thing?’”

It didn’t come to that. The management of GM had no more desire for a bloodbath than Murphy did. After seven years of depression, capitalism was in poor enough repute as it was; to add manslaughter to the indictment against it would have been disastrous. The company extended feelers to the workers’ representatives.

Roosevelt nudged things along. After a briefing from Frances Perkins on the status of the negotiations, he placed a call to William Knudsen, the GM chief. “I know you have been through a lot, Bill, and I want to tell you that I feel sorry for you,” he said. “Miss Perkins has told me about the situation and what you are discussing, and I have just called up to say I hope very much indeed that you go through with this and that your people will meet a committee.” Knudsen hid whatever surprise he felt at receiving the president’s call and responded in what Roosevelt took as a positive tone. The president reinforced the car man’s cooperation. “Fine, fine, Bill,” he said. “Thank you very much, Bill. That’s good.”

Six weeks into the strike, GM accepted the United Auto Workers as the bargaining agent for the employees in the striking factories. John L. Lewis characteristically took credit. A touch of flu constrained his eloquence, but he managed to call the agreement “another milestone on labor’s march.” A GM spokesman said simply, “Let us have peace and make automobiles.”

The conquest of steel came harder. Big Steel took a lesson from Big Auto’s experience, and rather than risk a sit-down strike of its own, U.S. Steel bowed to Lewis’s demand that the SWOC be recognized as the representatives of the steel workers. The company moreover gave the workers a raise and made the forty-hour week standard.

But Little Steel resisted, largely to avoid being sucked under in Big Steel’s wake. Big Steel might pay the workers more and still profit; Little Steel might not. Thomas Girdler of Republic Steel responded to the CIO’s success in enrolling workers at U.S. Steel—three hundred thousand within sixty days of Big Steel’s surrender—by branding the CIO’s organizers communists. The undeniable fact that more than a few CIO members were indeed card-carrying Communists lent plausibility to the charge, but what made Girdler’s opposition more formidable was the weaponry—shotguns, tear gas grenades, billy clubs—he provided to Republic’s security guards. On Memorial Day 1937 Girdler’s four hundred guards squared off against some thousand strikers and supporters at Republic’s South Chicago plant. Police joined the guards as the strikers approached the plant, and a bloody riot ensued. At least ten persons were killed and several dozen injured.

The Chicago violence mirrored trouble elsewhere. Police mortally shot three men outside a CIO office in Masillon, Ohio. Two steelworkers died in fighting at Youngstown. The governor of Pennsylvania declared martial law to forestall bloodshed at Johnstown.

Labor leaders called on Roosevelt to condemn the heavy-handedness of the police and the corporate enforcers. The business classes insisted that he speak out against labor’s excesses. He did both, after a fashion. In a press conference in late June a reporter inquired of his reaction to the recent struggles between labor and management. “I think I can put it this way,” he answered. “Charlie Taft”—the son of President William Howard Taft and chairman of a mediation board that had failed to achieve a settlement between steelworkers and management—“and I agree that in the nation, as a whole, in regard to the recent strike episodes, the majority of people are saying just one thing, ‘A plague on both your houses.’”

“Could you interpret that a little bit, Mr. President?” the reporter followed up.

“There is the old dunce cap,” Roosevelt answered, irritated at being pressed. “Isn’t that perfectly clear? It ought to be.”

“Is that your opinion?”

“It is what we agreed.”

“The majority of Americans?”

“That is what Charlie Taft and I agreed was the general feeling in the country.”

“What are you going to do about the plague, Mr. President?”

“I think that covers it all right…. You can use that direct if you want. ‘A plague on both your houses’—that is what we agreed to.”

Unsupported by the president, the strike against Little Steel petered out. “Though not as yet officially called off, the strike is lost,” a sympathetic journalist wrote in the
Nation
in midsummer 1937. “To deny it is plain silly.” This reporter, and other observers, blamed the harsh tactics of Little Steel, the complicity of state authorities, and the inexperience of the strike leaders in dealing with the steel industry.

John L. Lewis blamed Roosevelt. “It ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table and who has been sheltered in labor’s house,” the CIO chief said, “to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.”

R
OOSEVELT MIGHT
have been willing to take a stronger stand on the strikes had he not been embroiled, during this same period, in the biggest mess of his presidency. The trouble, entirely of his own making, began in another news conference, shrouded in greater secrecy than usual. As the reporters filed into his office on February 5, 1937, Roosevelt sat silently behind his desk. “All in,” the assistant controlling entrance declared, closing and blocking the door. The correspondents knew Roosevelt had come from a special meeting of the Democratic congressional leadership and another of the cabinet. They didn’t know the topic of those meetings.

Roosevelt looked about the room, scanning his audience with greater care than usual. “I have a somewhat important matter to take up with you today,” he said. “And I am asking that this message of today”—he held up a sheaf of papers—“be held in very strict confidence until the message is released…. Copies will be given to you as you go out, and don’t anybody go out until that time.”

He laughed, less heartily than was his custom. The reporters laughed with him, uncertainly. One joked, “We brought our lunches.” Roosevelt replied, “I’m glad you did.”

“As you know,” the president continued, “for a long time the subject of constitutionality of laws has been discussed. And for a good many months now I have been working with a small group in going into what I have thought of as the fundamentals of the subject rather than those particular details which make the headlines.” He again observed the audience, to catch their reaction. None said a word; all listened intently, most taking notes.

Roosevelt produced a letter from the attorney general describing the increasing workload on the federal courts and the mounting delays this had produced. “More than fifty thousand pending cases, exclusive of bankruptcy proceedings, overhang the federal dockets—a constant menace to the orderly processes of justice,” Roosevelt read. “It is an intolerable situation and we should make shift to amend it.” The attorney general recommended creating new judgeships at the district and circuit level. But this action, he said, should be part of a comprehensive overhaul of the federal judiciary.

The president now turned to a message of his own, which, as he explained, he would deliver to Congress in less than an hour. Partly reading, partly extemporizing, Roosevelt covered the main points. He explained how the role of the federal courts and judges had evolved during the decades since independence. “For example, from the beginning, over repeated protests to President Washington, the justices of the Supreme Court were required to ‘ride circuit’ and, as circuit justices, to hold trials throughout the length and breadth of the land—a practice which endured over a century.” Roosevelt put down his papers and looked out above his glasses. “I might add that riding circuit in those days meant riding on horseback. It might be called a pre–horse and buggy era.” This joke on himself—his references to the pre–New Deal era as the age of horse and buggy in Republican politics had become a cliché—elicited the laughter he expected. “That is not in the message,” he added, to more laughter.

He returned to his text. He noted that the composition of the federal courts had been in frequent flux since 1789. The Supreme Court, for instance, had been established with six members; it shrank to five in 1801; it expanded to seven in 1807; it grew to nine in 1837 and ten in 1863; it fell back to seven in 1866; it returned to nine in 1869.

By now it was clear where Roosevelt was going, and the reporters sat absolutely still, listening intently for the first airing of what certainly would be a radical proposal. “At the present time the Supreme Court is laboring under a heavy burden,” the president declared. The workload was clogging the channels of justice. The high court was compelled to decline to hear the great majority of the cases presented to it. Part of the problem—not simply for the Supreme Court but for the federal courts in general—was the inadequate numbers of judges. But part involved the fact that the judges held office for life. “This brings forward the question of aged or infirm judges—a subject of delicacy and yet one which requires frank discussion,” Roosevelt said. Until 1869, federal judges had received no pensions. As their modest salaries left little for saving, most judges had had no alternative to working “to the very edge of the grave.” Roosevelt looked up. “I am talking about 1869,” he said, to laughter. Congress in 1869 had passed a pension law making it possible for judges to retire with financial dignity. But many didn’t retire, preferring to remain on the job. The legislators who had drafted the pension law were surprised. “It was then proposed that when a judge refused to retire upon reaching the age of seventy, an additional judge should be appointed to assist in the work of the court.” The proposal passed the House but failed in the Senate. The situation festered until 1919, when a new law was passed providing that the president could appoint additional district and circuit judges upon determining that incumbent judges over seventy were unable to discharge their duties on account of mental or physical impairment. But this law had proved ineffective, for the obvious reason. “No president should be asked to determine the ability or disability of any particular judge,” Roosevelt observed.

The problem remained. It was more subtle than most people realized. Modern jurisprudence involved immense complexities, Roosevelt said. Judges had to be at the top of their game. And they had to be sensitive to changing social, economic, and scientific conditions. Older judges sometimes couldn’t keep up. “Little by little, new facts become blurred through old glasses fitted, as it were, for the needs of another generation; older men, assuming that the scene is the same as it was in the past, cease to explore or inquire into the present or the future.” This truth was recognized in most areas of employment, by the government no less than in private industry. Civil servants had to retire at seventy. Military and naval officers had to retire at sixty-four. Several states required judges to retire at specific ages. Federal judges, almost alone, were exempt, to the detriment of their performance. Roosevelt proposed to remedy the situation by “a constant and systematic addition of younger blood,” which would “vitalize the courts and better equip them to recognize and apply the essential concepts of justice in the light of the needs and the facts of an ever-changing world.”