American Experiment (307 page)

In olden times a President in this predicament might have used his leadership of the governmental and party team to put through party programs over opposition in Congress, state governments, and even the judiciary. This choice was not open to FDR by the late 1930s, for he had not been a strong party leader and his party was not unified philosophically or organizationally. The Democratic party by the mid-nineteenth century had lost much of its egalitarian spirit of Jeffersonian days and had become an alliance of northern commercial and southern agrarian interests and a vehicle of compromise over slavery. For a century, beginning with Martin
Van Buren and continuing through FDR, the party had honored a largely unspoken bargain: Northerners would be granted the presidential nomination, Southerners would maintain balance-of-power control in Congress. And this bargain embraced an even less spoken one: northern Democrats would not threaten white hegemony in the South in a quest for black votes. Woodrow Wilson, of southern background, had scrupulously lived up to this bargain, as had FDR less scrupulously in expressing sympathy for the plight of blacks but shunning civil rights legislation.

The Democracy was weakened and compromised in other ways as well. The adoption of the primary system and the other middle-class, “good government,” and antiparty reforms in the early years of this century had robbed the party leadership of its most potent tool—control over nominations. Many city and other local elections had become nonpartisan, at least in form, and party patronage had been curbed. Since 1933 Jim Farley had provided skillful leadership in Washington, but the party as an organization was withering at the grass roots. It had become too spindly in most rural and small-town areas, too muscle-bound in many urban, “boss-ridden” precincts, and too conservative and conventional in general to recruit the millions of workers, youths, elderly persons, women, and others who were now turning to their own organizations. The Democracy, which had originally gathered strength as a mass movement under “radical” leadership, had lost its power to mobilize the masses.

Nor was FDR the man to recruit and mobilize the tired and tattered battalions left in the party. Few Presidents had ignored or bypassed their party organizations more than he had. During the emergency year of 1933 he had played down his role of party leader even to the extent of shunning Jefferson Day celebrations. We are thinking, he said piously the next year, “about Government, and not merely about party.” That same year he backed Bob La Follette and other Progressive candidates over Democratic party nominees but cold-shouldered the “left-wing” Upton Sinclair, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in California. In 1936 he leaned heavily on Farley and the national Democracy but bypassed the party in setting up a separate election group of laborites and the “nonpartisan” Good Neighbor League. Both these groups worked for Roosevelt in particular but not for Democratic party candidates in general.

Then, in 1938, the “nonpartisan” leader who had brought the Democratic party great victories but also neglected and bypassed it, suddenly, with lizardlike rapidity, dubbed himself “head of the Democratic party,” held himself responsible for carrying out the party program, and began purging the party of its unfaithful. Roosevelt watchers were bewildered: what strategy was FDR following now? During his first year or two, during
the emergency days, it had been a strategy of bipartisanship, as Roosevelt tried to unite both parties behind the NRA and other programs. Then he had switched to a conventional party strategy of uniting the Democracy by devoting much time and political capital to mediating between northern liberals and southern conservatives, at the risk of alienating labor, urban, and left-wing leaders. This approach helped him win his nationwide victory in 1936, but then, with his Court-packing and other ventures he had moved left in search of a different political base. The difference between an electoral victory for Roosevelt and his party in 1936 and a collective victory for his liberal program became clear as his personal coalition collapsed in 1937 and 1938 in the face of counterattacks by southern conservatives and desertions by some northern progressives and laborites.

The Grand Strategist appeared to be more a Grand Experimenter. But Roosevelt had the fine quality of learning from his victories and defeats. He had learned from the purge something about the outer limits of his power to reshape the Democratic party in the South. His defeats at the hands of George et al. and his inability even to gain a toehold in such bastions as Senator Glass’s Virginia had suggested that a quick and improvised personal campaign was not enough; only a carefully planned, comprehensive, and long-run effort had any chance of overcoming such redoubts. At the same time his success in ousting O’Connor in Manhattan indicated that there might be more possibilities in the North than the President had realized.

What were those possibilities? The most arresting had for some years been a dream of a number of Democrats—including at times of Roosevelt himself. This was to convert the Democratic party into the clearly liberal-left party of the nation. “We’ll have eight years in Washington,” Tugwell remembered his boss saying to some liberal friends in 1932. “By that time there may not be a Democratic party, but there will be a Progressive one.” Wallace and Ickes and other Administration leaders tended to agree. But just what did FDR intend? To make a dramatic appeal to third-party leaders and members to join the Democratic party? Or to desert his own party, set up a new progressive party as Theodore Roosevelt had done in 1912, and lead liberal Democrats into it? Or simply to try to oust southern conservatives from the Democracy and hope that progressives would join a clearly liberalized Democratic party?

The purge had proved that the last option would not transform the Democracy; even after FDR’s honest effort to purge southern conservatives, progressives did not flock to the Democratic party banner, perhaps
because the effort had failed. The option of a new party was out. Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, the President was not a party-breaker. Besides, FDR was in office, while Cousin Theodore had been out of it and wanting back in. What about seeking to liberalize the Democratic party? To a considerable extent the President had already done this, in party program and policy. But it was notable that such Democratic leaders as Al Smith had not deserted the party—they had merely deserted Roosevelt. Nor were southern Democrats quitting. Even after FDR showed them the door and tried to push them through it, they refused to leave their father’s mansion— partly because it was their father’s mansion.

So eight years after making that electrifying statement to Tugwell, Roosevelt was no nearer to creating a cleanly progressive party. The reason may have been clear to him as a practical matter if not in theory. He was not dealing with a two-party system in which liberal and conservative crossovers would be easy—conservative Democrats hungering to switch over to a right-wing GOP, or liberal Republicans panting to join the Democracy. He was coping with a four-party system in which right-wing Democrats enjoyed their power in Congress and were wary of joining a Republican party that contained hosts of liberals, while liberal Republicans enjoyed their considerable power over presidential nominations and were not eager to join a party of southern Negro-oppressors and northern city bosses.

The four-party system, then, stretched across a spectrum in which Roosevelt Democrats stood on the moderate left, Hughes and Landon Republicans were near the center, George and Tydings and Byrd Democrats stood to the right of center, and congressional Republican leaders held well to the right of them. These four parties were not merely party wings or collections of like-minded voters. They were built into government. Presidential Democrats held the office, with a boost from the electoral college, which favored Democratic contenders from the big urban states. The presidential Republican party tended to dominate presidential nominating conventions. Over on the conservative side of the spectrum the two congressional parties were happy to stay in their places, partly because each had a virtual stranglehold on certain party policies and partly because, sitting cheek by jowl ideologically, they had their own conservative coalition.

Reshaping the Democracy into a liberal party that could compete with a reshaped conservative Republican party was a forbidding prospect for FDR, in short, because the parties had already been realigned into a durable four-party system. Hence it was not surprising that FDR gave up this particular battle, at least for the time being. He had good reasons to do so. His own political stock was low after the purge struggle; he faced the
likelihood of losing more and more influence as he neared the end of his second and presumably last term; heightening tension abroad was beginning to affect domestic politics and might bring its own realignment of political forces. It is doubtful that the President conceptualized the problem systematically; but certainly he had a feeling in his gut that he had tried to liberalize American politics and failed.

So he would return to the “politics of
personalismo
”—the politics of personal leadership, of putting together ad hoc coalitions in Congress and the country as opportunity dictated, of gaining short-run advances on a few fronts instead of making a policy or program breakthrough on a big front. Once again he would become Tactician-in-Chief, the transactional leader of the Broker State. But there was a price to pay for Roosevelt and his Administration: continued administrative cross-purposes, policy disarray, short-run planning, and political expediency, counterbalanced to some degree by advantages of flexibility and adaptability in the face of increasingly visible signs of new troubles abroad.

The price for much of the nation was more severe. In mobilizing his great majority of 1936,Roosevelt had raised hopes that he was realizing an ambition that had mesmerized the American left for more than a century—that a mighty coalition of liberal reformers, egalitarian leftists, women and black liberationists, urban radicals, socialist reconstructionists, and their allies could build and maintain a solid majority left of center, win political power, and enact into law their version of the ideology of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In their time—especially in the 1920s—conservative Republicans had exploited their own “compact majority”; surely the 1930s would be the time of a united liberal-labor-left.

It was not to be. The reasons were manifold: deep divisions within the popular majority; the powerful resistances of the political system to broad popular control, as the Framers had intended; Roosevelt’s proclivity for short-run, “practical,” ad hoc ventures and measures; the necessarily experimental and tentative nature of much of the New Deal. But perhaps the profoundest obstacle to a united and effective left majority was far less visible and yet all the more powerful, gripping the minds of leaders and followers alike. This was the set of “inarticulate major premises” informing the action and inaction of American liberalism and the American left during the days of the New Deal.

The idea that still gripped the American mind in the 1930s, as it had in the previous century and the century before that, was liberty—the “most
precious trait,” John Dewey called it, the “very seal of individuality.” But the idea of liberty—or freedom—was still more a source of ambivalence than of coherence in the American consciousness. Just as the idea had been used both to defend and to attack first slavery and then capitalist power in the nineteenth century, so it was used both to defend and to attack the New Deal in the twentieth. “Negative” liberty as the precious right of Americans to be protected against interference by government and other outside intruders, “positive” liberty as the right to use government for the protection and expansion of individual rights—this crucial distinction now defined the struggle over the meaning of freedom.

The idea of freedom crowned the great Enlightenment and revolutionary trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and these words could well have been inscribed on the banner of 1930s liberalism in America and of the New Deal. But to lengthen the arc along which New Deal liberal ideas were arrayed was merely to broaden the ambiguity. No one saw the incoherence of liberalism more keenly than its leading explicator in America, John Dewey. The nineteenth-century liberals who had been the dedicated and effective foes of absolutism, he wrote in 1935, had themselves become intellectual absolutists. Their doctrine had become frozen. “Since the ends of liberalism are liberty and the opportunity of individuals to secure full realization of their potentialities,” and since “organized social planning” alone could secure these objectives, he urged, liberalism must for the sake of its ends reverse its means.

Had the famous “pragmatist” given up his faith in hardheaded experimentation, in testing ideas by their concrete results, only to embrace a new doctrine? Not fundamentally. But this former denizen of Hull-House, who had shared Jane Addams’s concern over how the other nine-tenths lived and had named a daughter for her, now saw the relation of knowing and acting in a more urgent context. Ideas and theory, he wrote in
The Journal of Philosophy
in 1935, must be “taken as methods of action tested and continuously revised by the consequences they produce in actual social conditions.” That was the old Dewey. But the “experimental method is not just messing around nor doing a little of this and a little of that in the hope that things will improve.” This was the Dewey who feared that the New Deal was doing exactly that. Just as the experimental method in science had to be controlled by “comprehensive ideas, projected in possibilities to be realized by action,” so that method in society had to be directed by a “coherent body of ideas.” This was the newest Dewey.

A coherent body of ideas, however, was precisely what the New Deal lacked after six years and more in office. The reasons go far to explain the intellectual incongruities of the New Deal.

The heritage of progressive thought was fragmented. The heritage lived on in old Bull Moosers and old Wilsonians who were still divided over whether trusts should be destroyed or controlled, pitted the New Freedom as represented by Brandeis against the kind of national power and responsibility urged by Herbert Croly, weighed the competing virtues of legal opportunity versus equal social and economic opportunity, and debated the extent to which government should aid women and blacks and poor farmers as well as more organized groups. The national government—how big and powerful it should be, how it should be used—was still the hard question that cut through the ranks of old progressives. Interviewing a sample of elderly survivors, historian Otis Graham found them deeply divided over the New Deal, with perhaps a 60-40 split against it. Among women progressives, Ida Tarbell opposed the New Deal, while Lillian Wald and Mary Wooley, president of Mount Holyoke, “followed their progressivism straight into the arms of the New Deal.”