American Experiment (306 page)

With their votes southern whites gave their verdict: the South would remain unreconstructed. George, Smith, and Tydings, FDR’s chief targets, all won decisively. Maverick and other FDR supporters—though not Lyndon Johnson—lost in Texas. While Barkley beat Chandler in Kentucky, several anti-New Dealers or semi-New Dealers won in northern states. FDR had one small but pleasing consolation prize. His friends in New York had used both American Labor party support and Democratic bosses to replace John O’Connor, FDR’s foe on the Rules Committee, with James H. Fay, a war veteran with impeccable Irish antecedents. Still, the purge had been a “bust,” as Farley had predicted. Said the President glumly, “It takes a long, long time to bring the past up to the present.”

But the nadir of FDR’s fortunes was yet to come. In the fall congressional elections the Republicans almost doubled their strength in the House and added eight senators to their small band in the upper chamber. While the liberal bloc in the House was halved, the Republicans lost not a single seat. Some promising Republicans with fresh appeal won in statewide elections as well: Leverett Saltonstall in Massachusetts, Robert A. Taft in Ohio, John Bricker in Ohio, Harold Stassen in Minnesota, while the young Tom Dewey almost overcame the redoubtable Herbert Lehman for governor of New York. A trio of progressive governors failed of reelection: Frank Murphy in Michigan, Philip La Follette in Wisconsin, Elmer Benson in Minnesota.

The President sought to play down the results. In the time-honored way of Presidents explaining midterm election setbacks, he contended that the trouble lay in local scandals and squabbles, labor strikes, poor candidates. And after all, his party still held big majorities in the House and Senate. But one fact could not be blinked: Franklin D. Roosevelt had suffered his first major electoral defeat in eighteen years.

FDR would willingly defy conservatives but not constituents. If it was a mark of his courage that he would press his fight for liberalism following his Court-packing and other legislative defeats and the “Roosevelt recession,” it was a mark of his caution that he took a much more moderate posture after the congressional and state election returns of 1938. He told the new Congress in January 1939 that “having passed the period of internal conflict in the launching of our program of social reform,” he and they must now “preserve our reforms.” Not that he would surrender
the New Deal ship. He warned the Democracy, in a Jackson Day dinner speech, against being the “Democratic Tweedledum” to a “Republican Tweedledee.” And he made a spate of major appointments guaranteed to raise conservative hackles: Hopkins to follow Roper as Secretary of Commerce, the now unemployed Frank Murphy to take Cummings’s place as Attorney General, Frankfurter to replace Cardozo in Holmes’s old seat on the Supreme Court, William O. Douglas to succeed Brandeis on the high bench.

But if Roosevelt would not retreat, he would not advance. He reverted once again to his old economic orthodoxy, refusing to equalize old-age benefits between rich and poor states by raising the federal contribution to Social Security. “Not one nickel more,” he said. “Not one solitary nickel. Once you get off the 50-50 matching basis the sky’s the limit.” He refused to support Wagner’s proposed national health program embracing medical insurance and funds for child and maternity care, public health services, and hospital construction. He complained to Morgenthau, according to the secretary, that he was “sick and tired of having a lot of long-haired people around here who want a billion dollars for schools, a billion dollars for public health.”

The President now seemed almost rueful about his public image. “You undergraduates who see me for the first time,” he told a delighted student audience at Chapel Hill, “have read … that I am, at the very least, an ogre—a consorter with Communists, a destroyer of the rich, a breaker of our ancient traditions.” They had heard, he went on amid laughter, that he had invented the economic royalist, was about to plunge the nation into both war and bankruptcy, and “breakfasted every morning on a dish of ‘grilled millionaire.’

“Actually I am an exceedingly mild mannered person—a practitioner of peace, both domestic and foreign, a believer in the capitalistic system, and for my breakfast a devotee of scrambled eggs.”

Even if the President had wished to expand the New Deal, Congress would have stopped him. The election results had bolstered southern committee chairmen as the power elite on Capitol Hill. They not only held the balance of power between Republicans and New Deal Democrats but used the ancient weapons of congressional attack on presidential leadership. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Texan Martin Dies, renewed its jabs at Ickes, Hopkins, Perkins, and other officials for their “softness on communists.” Another committee under Howard W. Smith exposed reds and irregularities in the National Labor Relations Board. A conservative coalition of southern Democrats attacked the President’s crucial appointing power, both by enforcing “senatorial courtesy”
against top appointments and by restricting the political activities of lower-echelon federal employees. Even more, Congress slashed funds for some New Deal agencies, and especially for administrative functions that in the long run might critically influence the impact of programs—planning, research, economic analysis, information, staffing.

The New Deal lived on, however, in substance and style—and no one personified it more arrestingly than Eleanor Roosevelt. It was in these waning days of the domestic New Deal that she moved to the fore as a leader extraordinarily sensitive to needs her husband’s program had not fully met. It was not surprising that she would work for women’s rights, or concern herself with dire problems of housing, health, and poverty in field and factory, or devote an enormous amount of time to the plight of the nation’s young people, several million of whom lacked jobs.

But the First Lady advanced as well into the nation’s most sensitive political and social battlefield—the needs and rights of black Americans. She established close working relationships with black leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter White while her husband remained cautious. She strongly supported an antilynching bill, in contrast to her husband, who deplored the horrifying lynchings in the South but dared not recommend legislation for fear of alienating southern congressional leaders who could kill or mutilate his other measures.

Eleanor Roosevelt not only had to cope with her husband’s caution, with aides close to Roosevelt who fretted over the pressure that black leaders put on their boss, with attacks on her in Congress, but had to walk a delicate line between respect for her husband’s political situation and her own right to speak and act for herself. Even more, she had to cope with herself—with her own class and cultural origins, with the influence on her of a great-aunt who had had slaves as personal servants, and with her own tendency to use words like “darky” and “pickaninny.” She learned as she led, and led as she learned.

Her symbolic role came to a magnificent climax in the spring of 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to permit Marian Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall. The First Lady promptly resigned her membership in the DAR and set about, with the enthusiastic help of Ickes and the permission of the President, to help make arrangements for the contralto to sing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Seventy-five thousand people mustered at the base of the memorial and along the Mall, a setting that Ickes called “unique, majestic, and impressive.” Marian Anderson began her performance with “America,” a paean to liberty. She ended it with “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” an ode to justice and a reminder of inequality.

Why did you lose?
The Nation
had asked the three progressive governors who failed of reelection in 1938, and the answers were revealing. They saw their defeats as part of a national reaction against the New Deal. People believed that government somehow “had muffed the ball,” said La Follette, that it “had tried to do the right thing, but that in spite of all our relief spending, pump-priming, and social legislation we were back where we started from—in the midst of depression.” Benson of Minnesota and Murphy of Michigan also saw the Roosevelt recession—though they did not call it that—as the underlying problem, especially in the farm areas of their states. La Follette quoted an agricultural economist on the big Republican gains among farmers: “I guess you can’t beat the price of cheese.”

Some New Dealers decided by the late thirties that the Administration had not only mismanaged the economy but mismanaged the New Deal itself. FDR’s lieutenants came in for a full share of blame. The peppery, cantankerous Ickes caused endless friction as he fought with all comers— Johnson, Morgenthau, Perkins, Hopkins, and especially Wallace. Other rivalries heating up in the Administration were fair game for Washington reporters. The President frowned on these conflicts, but his administrative methods seemed to encourage them; he even appeared to enjoy pitting bureaucrat against bureaucrat. He delegated power so loosely that agency chiefs found themselves entangled in crisscrossed lines of authority. That New Deal programs were uncoordinated and improvised also made for friction. And the President was often an enigmatic boss.

“You are a wonderful person but you are one of the most difficult men to work with that I have ever known,” Ickes blurted out to FDR one day, according to his diary.

“Because I get too hard at times?” Roosevelt asked.

“No, you never get too hard but you won’t talk frankly even with people who are loyal to you and of whose loyalty you are fully convinced. You keep your cards close up against your belly.”

Some have found method in FDR’s administrative madness. His technique of fuzzy delegation, according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “often provided a testing of initiative, competence and imagination which produced far better results than by playing sale by the book.” By flouting the administrative rule of “making a mesh of things,” even at the risk of making a mess of them, the President avoided hardened arteries of structure and control. And as usual he was willing to take on the burden of
salving the aches and lacerations that resulted from the administrative infighting.

Yet Roosevelt himself had serious qualms about this way of running things. Since his years in the Navy Department he had maintained a strong interest in executive leadership, planning, and management. He set up an Executive Council of cabinet officers in 1933 and later a National Emergency Council of wider membership; these dwindled into mere clearinghouses of information. By 1936 the President was so troubled by the organizational confusion and policy disorder of the New Deal that he was surprised the Republicans did not make it a crucial issue in the campaign. Realizing that “the President needs help,” he established the Committee on Administrative Management, which developed many of the proposals that made up his ill-fated reorganization proposal of 1937. One of the committee’s few recommendations that survived the legislative gantlet was its proposal that the President be given six assistants with “a passion for anonymity.”

If the President wanted better management, why did he tolerate and even encourage tangled lines of organization, duplication of effort, and administrative cross-purposes in the executive branch? Partly because he had no choice. He utterly lacked the personnel, machinery, and power for centralized supervision and management. For six years the President’s staff consisted of a press aide, an executive assistant, a bevy of devoted secretaries, one or two speech writers, a legal counsel, and a handful of advisers from outside the White House. To hold the scattered strings of administrative control in his own hands, to get his instructions carried out, to keep subordinates from ganging up on him, even to find out what was going on in the lower echelons, he had his lieutenants come to him, be dependent on him, confide in him, let him pass out rewards and penalties. Hence the Chief Executive became also Chief Disorganizer and Chief Manipulator.

Even more, the disarray of presidential management and planning was part of the peculiar American system of checks and balances in the structure of the federal government and indeed in the whole federal-state-local pyramid of government. There was nothing FDR could do about this; the Framers of the Constitution had bequeathed it all, and the essential structure had not altered in a century and a half. Roosevelt had to work with all the blockages, slowdowns, veto traps, and compromises built into a system deliberately fashioned to thwart rapid governmental response to popular majorities and to thwart consistent and continuous follow-through on policy and program.

The crucial test for Roosevelt was his capacity to wring from the system
as much of a New Deal program as was possible, and he met this test magnificently. Day after day, he patiently, cunningly, even cynically, pulled strings, played on men’s ambitions, exploited their vanities, applied soothing syrup—inspired them, manipulated them, raised them up, put them off, and eased them away when they were no longer useful to him.

He did all this so well, indeed, that he may never have recognized how much the system eroded the substance and impact of his New Deal programs. Even more, he never truly confronted the system that in the end would defeat him. All his personal politicking, coaxing, and manipulating could not pack the Supreme Court or purge Congress or reorganize the executive branch, but he was successful enough in his daily maneuvering and dealing to achieve at least half-victories on many policies. Indeed, these partial victories may have helped the President to misconceive the constitutional system of delay and deadlock that he faced. In calling for Court reform he had described President, Congress, and judiciary as three workhorses proceeding in harness, and he had rebuked the Supreme Court for not doing its part on the team. But the Framers had not set up the federal government to be a team—quite the opposite.

The problem was that the President faced more than groups of legislators and judges and bureaucrats who happened to differ with him. He confronted men and women who were leaders of institutions that had different constitutional foundations, traditions, career patterns, political constituencies, and ideological or policy outlooks than the President’s. Hence to attack individuals in these institutions was not only to trigger opposition from their friends and followers but to activate the full powers of the institutions themselves. To challenge a congressional committee chairman like Senator George meant taking on the seniority system and all that went with it. To seek to add members to the Supreme Court was to challenge the whole judicial system. To curb the independence of an agency like the Army Corps of Engineers or the Federal Reserve Board was to activate a host of client interests backing such agencies. Inevitably New Deal programs were morselized in the ensuing clashes.