Forgotten Man, The (6 page)

The paramount symbol of such immigrant independence was the Bank of United States, which served immigrants and within a few years was establishing sixty offices spread out around New York. The bank’s very name—Bank of United States, not Bank of
the
United States or Bank of America—was awkward. Its position was also awkward—while it was large, because immigrants were arriving fast and saving aggressively, it was not a member of the New York Clearing House, and therefore outside the established network of banks. Indeed, one likely reason for the bank’s official-sounding name was to signal that the bank was part of the American dream, and as close as a private bank could come to being as trustworthy as government.

The Bank of United States served the textile and clothing businesses—the rag trade and many others, for depositors would soon number 400,000. From the jewel trade to the wholesale meat business, immigrants were integrating into the New York economy. Among the Jewish families in the city throngs were kosher butchers named Schechter, in Brooklyn. In the late 1920s several banded together to open the Schechter Brothers wholesale poultry slaughterhouse.

Blacks were part of this story. Some were coming up in the great migration from the South—leaving the flood zone, giving up homes and, sometimes, land—to establish themselves in an entirely new place, northern cities. At the time, the step seemed wise. There was now a small black upper class in cities like New York, the old middle class in Harlem’s Strivers’ Row being joined by wealthy blacks. In the North, unlike the South, black children could attend school, and their parents had some choice of work. Black illiteracy decreased to 16.4 percent in 1930, from 45 percent in 1900. Fewer black babies died at birth—by half. Black life expectancy was rising. Most important, blacks were able to find work at about the same rates whites did. Data from the 1930 census would show black unemployment nationally standing slightly below white unemployment.

Coolidge of the party of Lincoln was not content with this. He wanted to see an end to lynchings in the South but was not clear whether Congress had the authority to reach over the states and do so. In December 1923 he said that “the congress ought to exercise all its powers of prevention and punishment against the hideous crimes of lynching.” But Congress was not inclined to act, and here his federalism seemed disingenuous.

The black impulse to strive, and black impatience at presidential hesitation, now found a strange expression: the cult of a self-taught preacher whom his followers called Father Divine. Father Divine had little education and, like other Baptist preachers, his own style of evangelizing. He did not speak his ideas as much as speak his way
toward
them. “God,” he would say, “is not only personified and materialized. He is repersonified and rematerializes. He rematerializes and he rematerialates.” Unlike the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, Father Divine taught that the salvation of blacks was through the Gospel of Plenty—through making it in Middletown, as it were. Here he was in line with Coolidge. Coolidge emphasized the economic progress of blacks when he spoke, arguing that equality would come after.

Father Divine also believed that it was destructive for blacks to think of themselves in racial terms—indeed, he himself refused to
recognize racial differences and did not allow his followers to do so. In other words, heaven was not a black Middletown or a white one but simply a heaven of the middle class. Though Father Divine preached in churches like others, his most famous center in the 1920s and early 1930s would be his Sayville, New York, home. Seventy-two Macon Street was a sprawling house, in a town that was a model of conservative and white suburbanism. Father Divine called it his “heaven.” Contemporary journalists mocked Father Divine’s movement as a parody of the general culture of aspiration in the 1920s; certainly he provided a contrast to Garvey. But Father Divine’s followers, like the followers of Booker T. Washington before him, had a respectable purpose: to improve themselves as individuals. Father Divine used movement money to acquire as much property as possible, mostly in all-white neighborhoods. Through him, he believed, poor blacks would become part of the American people, great and anonymous.

Overseas, all these American successes were being noted. In 1927
Literarische Welt,
a German periodical, quizzed eleven Berlin citizens chosen as typical to see if they recognized names on a list. All eleven knew who Thomas Edison was; ten knew Henry Ford. Only four knew who Joseph Stalin was. Edison himself knew whom he should thank for his own and America’s standing in the world. That same year the
New York Times
published an interview with Edison, now just on the brink of retirement. It contained the following exchange:
NYT:
“Do you think President Coolidge will be renominated and reelected?” Edison: “He ought to be.”

Still, evaluating the specific worth of Mellon’s contribution or Coolidge’s reticence remained hard for most. Only a few favored Mellon over Hoover as Coolidge did. To the rest of the country Mellon was a distant figure. To the farmers, he was even the enemy; his gold standard kept grain prices low. As another election approached in 1928, it was Hoover who knew how to put on a political show, and Hoover who was becoming ever the greater figure. His plan for the Colorado River was coming together as the states agreed to the project. Under the Compact Clause of the Constitution, Congress
would approve the dam agreement and allocate funds for it—but the project would also be the states’. Later in the decade, the project to dam Black Canyon was put up for bid. Six Companies, a group of West Coast titans specially put together for the project, won the job. There had long already been a Roosevelt Dam, named after Teddy Roosevelt. Even Coolidge, who so detested displays of public power, would get a dam: in 1924 Congress authorized participation in construction of the Coolidge Dam on the Gila River in Arizona. A town in the area, reclaimed with the erection of the dam, would also be called Coolidge. It seemed obvious that one day the Colorado River dam would be the Hoover Dam.

Hoover’s meticulousness about the legal process for the Colorado dam reflected the tensions of the times. The Muscle Shoals project had certainly employed people, as many as eighteen thousand workers at peak. But the nitrates that had arrived too late were a sort of national joke about the inefficiency of government. Coolidge stood for privatization—he had said that “if anything were needed to demonstrate the almost utter incapacity of the national government with an industrial and commercial property, it has been provided by this experience.” Hoover too opposed a government-owned Muscle Shoals.

The Colorado dam was becoming Hoover’s demonstration that the problem of power could be solved another way than by nationalization. Of his 1927 flood work he summed up: “We saved Main Street with Main Street.” This statement reflected his own nuanced positions on such projects; he had not said, “Main Street saved Main Street by itself.” Washington’s task was to referee.

As the floodwaters receded, the commerce secretary himself withdrew to Bohemian Grove, a retreat for the western elite in the redwood country of northern California. At an all-male powwow, he conferred with political leaders. The papers reported that his following in the South was now so strong that he did not even need the administration’s support to get a share of that region’s electoral votes.

Coolidge was increasingly perplexed. As Hoover later recorded, the two had discovered that there was no getting around the essential difference in their philosophy: “One of his sayings was, ‘If you see ten
troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you and you have to battle with only one of them.’…The trouble with this philosophy was that when the tenth trouble reached him he was wholly unprepared, and it had by that time acquired such momentum that it spelled disaster.”

Coolidge could see that now the spotlight was on Hoover, and that, looking closer, the country liked what it saw. More than ever, the fact that Hoover was a businessman had an appeal. That he was a westerner—after Coolidge of Vermont and Massachusetts, Harding of Ohio, Wilson of New Jersey, and Theodore Roosevelt of Oyster Bay, New York—was also a plus. If Hoover was more active than Silent Cal, that might not weigh against him. The Engineer, as he was called, seemed to the public to represent a useful update of the old laissez-faire man in these more vigorous times. After his flood feat, citizens were ready to give him a wider mandate.

Coolidge now had a problem. If he didn’t want Hoover to supplant him, he didn’t necessarily want to stay either. “It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly and for the most part sincerely assured of their greatness,” he would write shortly after leaving the presidency. In the same volume, a short autobiography, Coolidge made a thoughtful argument against long service in the job, noting that “the presidential office is of such a nature that it is difficult to conceive how one man can successfully serve the country for a term of more than eight years.” Too often, the man became the office. He did not want to be such a man.

That same summer, the summer of 1927, Coolidge issued a short statement: “I do not choose to run for president in 1928.” There was coyness there—what if there were no choice, and candidacy were foisted upon him? But with each month it became clearer that he would indeed leave the presidency after his five and a half years. It was another of Coolidge’s acts of refraining, his last and greatest. And again, it opened a door for Hoover.

July 1927
Average unemployment (year): 3.3 percent
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 168

ONE LATE JULY DAY IN
1927, in the same week that Hoover would present a ten-year flood-prevention plan to Congress, a steamship left the New York piers and headed out into the Atlantic. Its name was the
President Roosevelt,
after America’s first progressive president, Theodore Roosevelt. The
New York Times
reported that the ship would dock at Plymouth, Cherbourg, and Bremen.

Among the travelers on the roster was “Prof. R. G. Tugwell”—Rexford Guy Tugwell, a dark-haired Columbia economist who had just turned thirty-six. Joining Tugwell was another professor, John Bartlet Brebner. The pair were part of a larger junket—academics, magazine writers, union men. Stuart Chase, a certified public accountant and economic commentator, had come with the party. Chase that year had with partner F. J. Schlink laid the ground for a new movement, the consumers’ movement, by establishing a group called Consumers’ Research—it would lead to the Consumers’ Union and the magazine
Consumer Reports.
Together the pair had also published
a manifesto for consumers,
Your Money’s Worth.
Their idea was that the average consumer deserved more recognition than the Sumners or the Coolidges allowed. Indeed, Chase tended to break down the world into simple categories—engineers were good, consumers were good, businessmen were suspect.

Another traveler was Carlos Israels, a Columbia law student and the son of one of New York governor Al Smith’s advisers, Belle Moskowitz. Silas Axtell, an attorney from the Seamen’s Union, was on the trip. The senior figure on the junket was the sixty-three-year-old socialist James Hudson Maurer, president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor. John Brophy of the United Mine Workers District 2 in Pennsylvania was on the ship, getting over his recent defeat in the contest for UMW leadership by John L. Lewis. Another voyager on the
President Roosevelt
was Albert Coyle, the editor of the
Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Journal
, and a conservative in the union world.

In Europe, the men would meet up with yet others: Paul Douglas, a labor scholar from the University of Chicago, whose rough, honest face and independent demeanor would later remind observers of the actor Spencer Tracy. Traveling too was George Counts, a professor at Columbia Teachers’ College and a disciple of the legendary educator John Dewey. There was a school superintendent from Winnetka, Illinois, Carleton Washburne, and a professor from the Divinity School at Yale. Alzada Comstock of Mount Holyoke, an expert in government finance, also came along. Robert Dunn, a labor researcher and early staffer at the American Civil Liberties Union, joined them; he would serve as secretary. In Russia around the same time was Roger Baldwin, a peace activist who had founded the ACLU. Baldwin was already a radical hero; he had been convicted in the United States of instigating unlawful assembly at a textile strike in Paterson, New Jersey, several years before. He had also spent nearly a year in prison for refusing to serve in World War I. The others respected him as a player in the world of ideas, a friend of the anarchist Emma Goldman.

At the time Benito Mussolini was popular across the world. Conservatives admired him for his efficiency; he made the cover of
Time
and filled the pages of
Forbes.
Mrs. William Randolph Hearst had embarked just a few months earlier from the same piers on the liner
Duilio,
on a trip to visit Il Duce. Some in this group wanted to stop in Italy, too, but Mussolini turned them down. The travelers spent time in Britain, some of it sampling clotted cream, strawberries, and meat pies, as Tugwell, a bit of a gourmet, later recalled. They also visited Germany and Belgium. But the ultimate destination of these travelers was a country that had been through a revolution just a decade earlier—the Soviet Union.

Soviet Russia was controversial in a way that Italy was not. The United States did not recognize the Soviet Union diplomatically. Even labor leaders like William Green of the American Federation of Labor opposed recognition, arguing that there was little in common between the cause of American labor and Russia’s revolutionaries. Green explicitly rejected the idea of an official delegation. John L. Lewis, the same man who had beaten Brophy and been Hoover’s partner, also made it clear he would not negotiate with Communists.

So the travelers carefully gave themselves a label: they were the first non-Communist, unofficial American trade union delegation. They saw themselves as objective and wanted to make sure others saw them that way as well. The trip was not truly independent, however, for Stalin’s regime controlled the itinerary inside Soviet borders, selecting the factories and farms they visited. What’s more, some of the less-known people on the trip, support staff included, were affiliated with the U.S. Communist Party. Either Tugwell, Chase, and the other scholars did not know this, or they were confident of their ability to protect themselves, to judge accurately regardless of whose company they were in.

“I want to study conditions for myself,” Maurer had retorted when he’d heard of the ban imposed by Green. If conditions were as awful as labor leadership said, then “those gentlemen should encourage American labor to go and get the data to bear them out.” The junket was funded by a nonprofit regarded as respectable, the Garland Fund, though Paul Douglas took the extra precaution of paying
for his own tickets. In any case, the travelers planned to demonstrate their good faith through their work. They would write out extensive notes and reports—at least one, maybe two volumes—to document the experience for U.S. readers. Interviews with Bolshevik leaders seemed possible.

Joseph Stalin had two reasons to host the guests. The first involved winning over American labor. The official policy of the Soviet Union might now be “Socialism in One Country,” but, if Stalin could draw the smaller fry to his side, he might split the U.S. movement and, eventually, capture it.

The second motive was more immediate. The Soviet revolution was failing. Communism needed Western cash to survive. The situation in the Soviet Union of 1927 was grave. As Comstock would note in a later report on the trip, the weakness of foreign trade represented “an ever-present source of danger.” This was why, just a bit earlier, Stalin had dropped the original Soviet goal of worldwide revolution. To get his money, Stalin needed legitimization. If he could win acceptance, or even better, formal diplomatic recognition, he would receive loans, perhaps enough to make him invincible at home.

The American side of the story was subtler. Diplomatic details aside, the concept of such a great land in the process of such great change was exciting, so exciting that the world seemed to split into those who had been there and those who had not. In this regard, the travelers on the
President Roosevelt
felt like the young Herbert and Lou Hoover, who had headed off to China or London for the excitement of the foreign adventure. The American frontier had been tamed; here was a new frontier, where projects might be tried that even Americans had never dreamed of. Already, a year earlier, Henry Ford had invited Russian factory workers to Detroit to train them to make Fordson tractors. It was Washington that seemed retrograde when it balked at granting visas. Moscow for its part had ordered ten thousand Fordsons. In the years after the
President Roosevelt
trip, thousands of Americans, especially engineers, would come to the Soviet Union to work, also in the spirit of adventure. Moscow in this
period heard the accomplishments of Thomas Campbell, the manager of the farm-factory in Montana. Stalin would counter with his own bid: a million acres for Campbell to work with if he started a Soviet farm. And Campbell would sail back to the States with praise for the Soviet experiment. The Soviet Union also appeared to be playing catch-up in other areas. Stalin, like the czars before him, had a flair for developing show projects that drew attention away from economic flaws.

The day that the
President Roosevelt
left Manhattan’s piers, the New York office of Amtorg, the Soviet trade representative in the United States, had announced that the Soviet Union had begun work on what would be Europe’s largest dam, Dnieprostroi, a giant in the Ukraine whose turbines would each deliver 50,000 horsepower. The engineer on the project was an American, Colonel Hugh L. Cooper of New York. Soviet boldness and American know-how might achieve what American know-how at home could not.

The same scale of ambition showed up in the Bolsheviks’ plans for the cities. Enormous buildings went up. Hoover might standardize brick size for paving roads. The Soviets went a step further, as Alzada Comstock would note in an article several years later, and simply commanded the cobblestone’s removal. Within several hours, volunteers removed 1,062 meters of cobblestones before the state opera house. The Soviet Union was fresh, and therefore interesting. Three years earlier, the progressive Lincoln Steffens had penned his famous summary of the achievement of revolutionary Russia, a summary that rang in the ears of the 1920s travelers. That summary did not say, “I have seen socialism and it works,” although Lincoln Steffens was a man of the left. It said: “I have been over to the future and it works.” Steffens also said, “I would like to spend the evening of my life watching the morning of a new world.”

Bob La Follette, the Wisconsin reformer, was one who had been over in 1923 with Lincoln Steffens; the Bolsheviks had put him up in a palace expropriated from a sugar merchant, across from the Kremlin. Another traveler who had preceded them was Roger Baldwin’s friend the anarchist debater Emma Goldman. Goldman’s lover,
Alexander Berkman, had shot Mellon’s friend Henry Frick three times and stabbed him twice in a rage over Frick’s treatment of workers. Washington had deported both Goldman and Berkman, sending them back to Russia on the U.S. Army transport
Buford,
nicknamed the Soviet Ark. Lillian Wald, a New York social worker, had also been to Russia and spoken of “the vast promise of the Soviet government and the strength and wisdom and social passion of Lenin.” The big question in the travelers’ minds was not therefore whether they ought to be going to a nation unrecognized by Washington—it was whether they were going there too late. Like Hoover, they knew it was advantageous to get somewhere early.

But there was a fundamental difference between men like Hoover and these travelers. Hoover belonged to a group that exported American ideas. His whole career had been about exporting American know-how and values—the know-how to mine zinc, the Quaker vision of doing fieldwork in occupied nations. The same held for, say, Mellon, who also saw little to learn from in the Soviet model. Mellon treated the old land of the czars as a salvage project: a few years after the travelers headed for Russia he would, through his art brokers, buy up Raphael’s
Madonna of the House of Alba
and several other masterpieces from the Hermitage. Samuel Insull was also an American exporter, albeit a naturalized one; after developing his power grid in Chicago, he went back to Britain to share his insight with Westminster, which planned construction of a similar grid for Britain. To such men, places like the Soviet Union were not the future, unless one could call a nightmare-come-true the future. “Inherent in Communist destruction,” Hoover at one point concluded, was a “shift from intelligence to ignorance.” Men like Hoover and Mellon believed in the primacy of the American idea. They might want to modify America, but they did not doubt her.

Men like the travelers, by contrast, were importers. They did doubt. Their progressivism went beyond the progressivism of, say, Theodore Roosevelt, after whom their ship was named, for they also believed specifically that ideas should be collected abroad and then used at home to improve the country. They despaired of
purely domestic solutions, and that despair often came out of long experience in those areas of national life that did still need improvement.

Agriculture, Tugwell’s area, was a good example. Tugwell’s father farmed fruits in Sinclairville in western New York. His mother, Dessie, had taught school. The pair were the leaders in their community, and people with a sense of style, a fact reflected in their baby’s audaciously long name. Tugwell had been a mischievous child, so much loved that when he ran away, his family served him lemonade and cookies upon his return. His family spread butter on their bread while others had bacon drippings.

Still, Tugwell concluded in his childhood that the American game was rigged against farmers. They had so many poor neighbors, and so much chance of again becoming poor themselves; Tugwell’s mother had been born in a place called No God Hollow. The first big downturn in the Tugwells’ lives came in 1893, when Rex was two, and others followed with disconcerting regularity. The boom-and-bust cycle of New England agriculture was too rough.

Farther north, in Maine, Douglas as a young man came to the same conclusion about life on the land. Douglas observed the struggles of lumberjacks sending timber south down Sebec Lake in the icy spring; each year, several drowned. What was the point of stingy New England, with the Great Plains turning out to be so easily fruitful? The New England of the Tugwells and young Paul Douglas was not quite the lawyer’s New England of Coolidge. It was more the New England that the poet Robert Frost wrote about—a rocky, small-scale place where the lawyer’s rigid insistence on tiny bits of private property and endless stone walls seemed to constrain the future. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” the poet would write about two farms. “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out?”

Tugwell and Douglas learned early that the plains that the New Englanders so envied had their own problems. The gold standard drove prices up and then down in a seemingly random fashion that sent punctilious farmers into despair. In the 1890s at Chautauqua,
New York—a summer lecture resort not far from the Tugwells—the politician William Jennings Bryan captured the national rage by speaking of the “Cross of Gold” that burdened farmers by keeping prices down.
Wallace’s Farmer,
a periodical edited by Henry Cantwell Wallace, chronicled farming troubles in every issue. Harding had made Wallace agriculture secretary.