Forgotten Man, The (29 page)

A woman from Connersville, Indiana, wrote to President Roosevelt:

 

I have been employed as a clerk at E.J. Schlichte Company this city for seven years five months until the N.R.A. went into effect. They let me out said they coulden’ pay me $14 a week. When the NRA Went into effect, I was so happy I had planned to lay in some coal and pay on some bills I owe, I guess I was too happy.

 

Yet other critics focused on the sheer unreality of the top-down culture of the NRA. Its demands for synchronization of wages and salaries were, when one thought of it, worthy of parody. As the humorist Ogden Nash put it in a poem:

 

Mumbledy pumbledy, my red cow,

She’s cooperating now.

At first she didn’t understand

That milk production must be planned…

…But now the government reports

She’s giving pints instead of quarts.

 

In words less succinct but equally authoritative, the scholars at the Brookings Institution came to the same conclusion. The codes didn’t work. “In trying to raise the real purchasing power the NRA put the cart before the horse,” wrote the Brookings authors. The idea of increasing national income—getting true growth—by “a general increase in nominal wages,” was, the authors said, a doubtful one. “The conclusion indicated by this résumé is that NRA on the whole retarded recovery.” In Congress, Roosevelt managed to win a commitment of a one-year extension for the NRA. Still, he now knew that the Supreme Court test would be decisive.

Roosevelt and the New Dealers figured that if they pulled in their horns a bit, the assaults on the NRA might abate. At the AAA, that meant the firing of Jerome Frank, the left-leaning general counsel. The occasion was a contract the former clerk of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Alger Hiss, had written requiring landlords to keep tenant farmers for the length of their cotton contracts. Frank was out, as well as Lee Pressman, with whom Tugwell would work again. But Hiss, lower ranking, stayed on for a time. Still, as Tugwell, who supported Frank, wrote in his diary, the issue was really part of a new plan “to rid the Department of all liberals.”

Frances Perkins likewise proceeded cautiously. In February, the giant Labor Department building whose cornerstone Hoover had laid was finally finished, and Frances Perkins and her department moved in—the department men’s chorus, Crescendo, sang at the occasion. But Perkins and her staff were not entirely comfortable with the grandiose feel. They had come into office claiming differences with Hoover, and yet the building was a daily reminder of the similarity of the two administrations’ work. She and Douglas had
their plans for unemployment insurance and pensions for senior citizens in draft bill form. At a tea at his house the year before, Perkins had sat beside Justice Harlan Stone, and he gave her a tip. She had confided her fears that any great social insurance system would be rejected by his court. Not so, he said, and whispered back the solution: “The taxing power of the federal government my dear; the taxing power is sufficient for everything you want and need.” If the Social Security Act was formulated as a tax, and not a government insurance, it could get through.

Still the legislation she developed did not speak of taxes or entitlements. It spoke of an old-age reserve “account,” the implication being that an account with the government was safer than one at a local bank. This was a powerful argument, given the rate at which banks had so recently collapsed. The administration depicted the whole program as government insurance for senior citizens, insurance that would come in tandem with unemployment insurance for workers and aid for the indigent.

Even this model, however, was encountering resistance. Roosevelt himself saw that while the program’s revenues might cover its costs now, the numbers from the actuaries suggested that there would not be enough money for old-age pensions for future generations. Morgenthau too made it clear to Perkins that he disapproved of any demands on the Treasury, even in future.

“Ah,” Perkins reports Roosevelt saying, “but this is the same old dole under another name. It is almost dishonest to build up an accumulated deficit for the Congress of the United States to meet in 1980. We can’t do that. We can’t see the United States short in 1980 any more than in 1935.” Perkins noted—as others before her had in similar situations—that the president was “in the midst of one of the minor conflicts of logic and feeling which so often beset him but kept him flexible.” Roosevelt’s opponents were firmer, especially Bennett “Champ” Clark, a Democratic senator from Missouri. If the Social Security program was entirely about social welfare, he said, then why not allow private companies with pension programs already in place to choose to stay out of the government program? This
would allow a genuine private-sector counterpart against which to measure the government program. Clark argued hotly that adding the Social Security levy to the costs of supplying the private pension would be onerous for some employers, and prohibitive for others. Without the opt-out of the Clark Amendment, companies would give up supplying private pensions. Why should they pay double when the government would do their work for them?

Outside Congress, there were also challenges. On January 2, 1935, the old chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Jouett Shouse, published a major article pointing out that the New Deal had created thirty agencies, nearly all close to the executive, leaving “the average citizen bewildered.” Shouse was joining up with Al Smith, Roosevelt’s old ally, to form a group called the Liberty League, whose goal was defeating him in the 1936 contest. James Warburg, angrier as the months passed, was giving speeches against Roosevelt’s “planned economy.” He was preparing to publish yet another book about Roosevelt. This time his title was
Hell Bent for Election.
In his introduction, Warburg would describe a party program that sounded just like Roosevelt’s—one that planned public pensions, more rights for organized labor, and so on. Then he would point out that that agenda had been not Roosevelt’s in 1932 but rather that of Norman Thomas, Jim Maurer, and the Socialist ticket. It was a rant, but a rant that would sell nearly a million copies.

In this, the sixth year of the Depression, people were developing new responses to adversity, some of which competed. Francis Townsend, a doctor, was selling his own pension scheme, at campfire hearths and in meeting halls across the land. Father Coughlin was on the radio, railing about the evil dole and “relief that has failed to relieve.” Huey Long had his new post in the Senate.

But there were also those whose responses existed on an entirely different plane—the spiritual, or the personal. One was Father Divine. More aggressive than the Schechters, the cult leader sought out chances to provoke—his own form of civil disobedience. In New York City, his Peace Restaurant mounted an anti-regulatory battle of its own, refusing to post hours of labor as required by New York
State law, provoking action by state authorities. He operated a boardinghouse without a license, so that officials pulled him into court. He allowed his truck drivers to drive without licenses—another clash. Father Divine’s followers sought to register to vote under their quirky names; a judge rejected the application by sisters Truth Delight, Charity Star, Mary Magdalene Love, and Joy Praise to vote under those names. On the names, city officials were as intolerant as the Schechter prosecution: “We do not intend to let them make this department ridiculous,” the chief clerk said.

Father Divine’s power was impressive. By now, a letter addressed simply “God, Harlem, USA” would reach him. On Easter Day of 1935, ten thousand of Father Divine’s followers, mostly black, a few white, mounted a four-hour parade along Harlem’s Seventh Avenue, singing “The world in a jug, and the stopper in his hand.” Father Divine himself rode, the paper reported, in a blue Rolls-Royce Victoria, “a white policeman standing like a footman on the right running board, and a negro policeman poised likewise on the other.” Father Divine wore Easter gray. Faithful Mary, his chief aide, followed him.

Father Divine was also developing a new plan—to make a statement through property purchases. He was buying up cheap farmland along the west side of the Hudson, widening his empire. He was also considering whether he might lead his flock into politics.

Bill Wilson, the hard-drinking stock analyst, for his part, was also developing a new response to adversity. He didn’t like the New Deal—a Green Mountain man like Coolidge, he found that his instincts ran against it—and he wrote letters to Roosevelt, longhand, as he drank. People should find a way to solve their problems closer to home. His wife, Lois, collected the little pieces of paper—she didn’t know why, but she later said she had thought they might be of value some day.

In May, Wilson headed out to Akron to see if he could gain control of a company through a proxy battle. The deal failed, humiliatingly, and he found himself standing in the Mayflower Hotel bar with only $10. Frantically he phoned a local minister, Reverend Walter Tunks, who gave him the name of Henrietta Seiberling, a woman
who had tried to help another alcoholic, a doctor named Robert Smith.

The next day Wilson and Smith met, in the afternoon, after Smith had slept off a binge. The meeting changed their lives. “Dr. Bob,” as he was known, was also from Vermont—St. Johnsbury, where Coolidge had attended school for a time. The two alcoholics decided that by sharing their challenge, they could help one another. Then and later, they talked out a few precepts: professionals weren’t necessary; alcoholism was a sickness, not a moral weakness; alcoholics were never cured, but a group might keep them on the wagon. Their insight was in part medical, in part psychological, and in part sociological. Part of the problem of the alcoholic was loneliness, especially nowadays—there was no longer the sort of New England village green where the men had grown up, to find consolation. Yet the traditional answer—going to a clergyman, or a doctor—did not seem to work for them. The two could not retrieve the old Vermont village, but they could build a new village, a community of alcoholics.

The Roosevelt entourage was working on another plane entirely, busy consolidating after the midterm election results. Chase was writing an article for the magazine
Current History
declaring that the New Deal was a victory for collectivization. Tugwell entertained the president with work on his favorite topic, agriculture. The descendant of fruit farmers reconnected with the descendant of Dutchmen on a topic dear to both their hearts: trees. Carrying mounted specimens of insects and leaves over to the White House from the Agriculture Department, Tugwell showed the president the damage that a new tree blight—Dutch elm disease—was doing to trees in the fifty-mile radius of Manhattan. As undersecretary of agriculture, Tugwell was spending $560,000 to forestall further devastation. Roosevelt was in the process of giving Tugwell his own agency, a resettlement administration, where he would be less likely to quarrel with agriculture secretary Henry Wallace. There he would rehabilitate poor people and poor land together—the unity of it pleased Tugwell. Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration by
executive order, thereby avoiding the need for congressional approval. The RA would be funded with emergency funds in another bill, one that could not be labeled “Tugwell.” Roosevelt admitted to himself that he was finding it costly to defend Tugwell. Frankfurter was back in the country after his own pilgrimage, to Britain, and two of his protégés, Tom Corcoran and Ben Cohen, had jobs in Washington. Already, the year before, the pair had written to Frankfurter in Britain that “[t]he Tugwell crowd has been pushed by its enemies—and its own loose talk—away over to the left. Ray is vacillating considerably toward the right”—the Ray was Moley.

There was one place where resistance built that the administration could not ignore: the courts. On January 7, Supreme Court justices had rejected the government’s defense of presidential authority in the “hot oil” cases. This was an affirmation, at least in part, of the public’s sense that the NRA’s activities could go too far.

The Justice Department took consolation in the fact that the opinion left unaddressed whether Congress had the power to regulate industry—and fought its other battles. The very next day, January 8, Attorney General Homer Cummings donned a pair of gold cuff links that had been given to him by the president and began the oral arguments in the gold case. Cummings reminded the justices of the emergency of the Depression, and railed against the “supposed sanctity and inviolability of contractual obligations.”

Roosevelt, uneasy, sought to determine what his options would be if the Supreme Court ruled that his gold policy was unconstitutional. Days after the oral argument began, he told Secretary Henry Morgenthau and Homer Cummings at lunch that he hoped to keep the bond market in confusion until the Supreme Court decided the gold-clause issue. Then, if the Court decided against the administration, things would still be so rough that the people would turn to the president and say: “For God’s sake, Mr. President, do something.”

Cummings liked the tactic. Morgenthau was horrified. “Mr. President,” he told Roosevelt, “you know how difficult it is to get this country out of a depression and if we let the financial markets of
this country become frightened for the next month it may take us eight months to recover the lost ground.” Morgenthau might be Roosevelt’s yes man, but he had already learned a few things at Treasury. Roosevelt indicated to Morgenthau the next night that he had been kidding, but Morgenthau believed the reality might also be that the president had simply, upon consideration, changed his mind.

As it turned out, the Court did not overturn the administration’s gold policy. After all, Congress had the power to regulate the currency, and it, in turn, had given Roosevelt the authority to manage the money. Roosevelt was satisfied, writing to Joe Kennedy, “With you I think Monday, February eighteenth was a historic day. As a lawyer, it seems to me that the Supreme Court has at last definitely put human values ahead of the ‘pound of flesh’ called for by a contract.” But Justice James McReynolds delivered a soliloquy: the New Deal’s “flippant approach to currency manipulation” was dangerous. Congress had no power to destroy the gold-clause commitment. Roosevelt was like a tyrant. “This is Nero at his worst. As for the Constitution, it does not seem too much to say that it is gone.” The meaning of the news was something the country found hard to grasp. Clearly it affected all private contracts. The
Christian Science Monitor
noted that it cut the value of “$75,000,000,000” in contracts—nine consecutive zeros being, at that time, something Americans were not accustomed to seeing. Railroad bonds were hurt, but so were Liberty Bonds, which seemed, to McReynolds, especially bitter. Utility bond holders’ losses were also now assured. The Dow moved up to 107—it had been 105 the day before—in the hours after the news, but the movement this time was more one of relief that a decision had been made than cheer at the news. The next day the index settled down and hung around 100 for the better part of a month. The gold issue, at heart, was one that was applicable to all contracts and property. Clearly McReynolds would react the same way if it came to the Schechters—to their right of contract with employees, to the right of the consumer to pick his chicken, to the general intrusiveness of the NRA.