Liars (11 page)

Wheeler put together a temperance army that didn't care about party or ideological labels. The “drys” would support any candidate from either party who adopted temperance as his campaign platform. They would use leaflets, advertisements, letter-writing campaigns, and visits from temperance advocates to increase public pressure on wavering legislators. Wheeler even coined the term
pressure group
to explain the League's tactics. This pressure was justified, of course, because Wheeler knew what was best for
the communities. The freedom to decide whether to drink alcohol responsibly didn't belong to individuals, because those decisions affected the collective. Only sobriety could cure men who tormented their communities, people like Old Soak and Hank.

The first target was Ohio's governor, Myron Herrick, who was hostile to the cause. If Wheeler could unseat the powerful sitting governor, he knew the Anti-Saloon League would demonstrate its political power and terrify other politicians into getting in line.

Wheeler, now head of the Ohio Anti-Saloon League chapter, began to encircle Herrick by slowly helping League allies get elected to the Ohio legislature. From this base of power, he built alliances to form a massive campaign against Herrick, finally defeating him in the 1905 election. Having enforced his will on Ohio, Wheeler then turned his gaze toward the rest of the country.

In 1915, he left behind his dry comrades in Ohio and went to Washington, D.C., to become the general counsel for the entire Anti-Saloon League of America. He scaled his pressure-group tactics up to a nationwide level and became one of the most effective lobbyists of his time.

In 1920, thanks in large part to Wheeler's efforts, the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which
banned “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” in the United States, went into effect. Prohibition was now in force across the nation. But instead of creating a new, perfect world, the law opened the door for bootleggers and organized crime to make millions from the distribution of liquor.

That was of little concern to Wheeler. The drunks and brutes who'd scared him when he was young would not be able to scare anyone else.

♠

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

—FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

Washington, D.C.

East Capitol Steps

March 4, 1933

It was a time for action. A time for vigor.

A time for mobilizing the power of the executive office in support of full-scale war.

The man in the morning coat and top hat sat rigid, his veins coursing with adrenaline, but his head never more clear. He—and, more important, his nation—had been waiting for this moment for decades. The reins of federal government had become dust-covered, untouched for far too long. They had to be grabbed and the slack wrung out on behalf of the people. And if a whip had to be taken
to the concentrated powers and the princes of property to give the forgotten man his fair shake, so be it.

A wry smile crossed his lips.

No longer would the weak use federal power for piddling projects in the face of crisis while labor lay dormant. No longer would the strong businessmen of the great trusts and their lapdog money changers be left to shape society to their selfish whims.

The ship of state was his for the steering toward a more social, equitable, and fair system.
Planning
was to be the operative word of the day, rather than wasteful, oligarchic, haphazard individualism. Could the politicians who surrounded him continue to just stand there, dazed and daunted, in the face of the rot of laissez-faire lunacy? No. The invisible hand was to be brought into the light of day.

There was nothing to fear but fear itself. And, he knew, there was no one better equipped to fill the vacuum of incompetency and inaction than himself, the newly elected president of the United States of America.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt put his enamel cigarette holder to his lips, struck a match, and took a long drag, thick smoke twirling in the cool air like so many of the dreams he was about to fulfill.

In that moment, he thought back to his days as a student at Groton and the much richer boys who never respected him. He thought of the last laugh he was sure to get over the bankers, lawyers, and industrialists who had doubted his cunning and intellect at Harvard and then at Columbia Law. They thought
they
were powerful—just watch.

He thought of his late cousin Teddy and how it was time to finally make good on the bold progressive vision and vigorous executive power he had championed. He thought about how Teddy had commanded the bully pulpit and breathed life into the American people. He thought about how through sheer personality and grit,
he, too, could marshal the resources of the nation for more social ends, not to mention his own.

He thought of Woodrow Wilson, who had appointed him assistant secretary of the Navy, just as President William McKinley had done decades earlier for Teddy. He knew he could take Wilson's revolutionary but academic critique of America and mold it into something practical and concrete, something truly useful for the little man. He knew that he'd not merely been pandering months earlier at the 1932 Democratic Convention when he said, “Let us feel that in everything we do there still lives with us, if not the body, the great indomitable, unquenchable, progressive soul of
our Commander-in-Chief, Woodrow Wilson.”

He thought back to his days at Hyde Park and his responsibility now to command a much larger estate.

He thought about how he had been preparing for this day his whole life.

Taking in the sea of people one last time from his chair, Roosevelt collected himself, clutched the arm of his son James, and gathered all the strength he could muster to ascend the steps to the podium. The steel braces dug into his sides, the pain nearly unbearable as he swung one leg in front of the other, the product of nearly a decade of determined rehabilitation to become somewhat mobile again. He had always been athletic, an embodiment of vivaciousness, much like Teddy, until one day, he woke up and couldn't feel his legs. But neither polio nor the attempt on his life mere weeks earlier could keep him from
his rightful office.

Franklin raised his right hand and repeated after Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes: “I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Yes,
he thought to himself,
I can take this oath, with a
caveat: it's the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet
any new problem of democracy.
He suspected the reactionaries on the Supreme Court might not go along with his plans, but such recriminations would have to wait for another day. Right now, it was time for hard facts.

Roosevelt began his address with confidence and conviction. “This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” he said. “[L]et me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Fear had gripped the nation ever since the stock market crashed three years earlier. Proud Americans who had once owned the polished cars and opulent mansions on the Upper West Side of his youth were reduced to beggars living in shantytowns in Central Park. Survival was now foremost in their minds. Freedom was a fine principle, but when your day consisted of living hand-to-mouth in search of scraps of food to keep your family and yourself alive, it didn't much matter. What mattered was giving people hope, even if it meant surrendering to the loving arms of a federal government. That was what FDR promised to deliver.

His legs throbbing, Roosevelt ignored the pain and enumerated the economic strains under which the country languished, laying the Depression right at the feet of the “rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods,” who had “failed through their own stubbornness and . . . incompetence.” The “unscrupulous money changers” had been discredited. Punctuating his point, FDR said that such men were merely “self-seekers [with] no vision, and when
there is no vision the people perish.”

There it was, the thing mankind feared the most: death. It was no accident that he'd carefully worked it into his speech. Scare them with their own demise, and then show them how, by following you, they can avoid it or at least stave it off for as long as possible.

Roosevelt's vision wasn't merely talk, however;
it required action. Men were to be put to work. “Redistribution” was to be achieved nationally. Supply and pricing imbalances were to be rectified. Foreclosures were to be halted. Government planning and supervision would rule the day. The greater good would reign.

The balance of power between the executive and legislative branches would have to be
tilted in his favor. “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis,” he said. “Broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact
invaded by a foreign foe.”

The crowd roared.

His wife, Eleanor, shuddered. She found
the crowd's raucous reaction a bit terrifying.

But, just across the way, prominent progressive journalist Walter Lippmann didn't shudder; he smiled. A few days earlier, he'd advised FDR that the situation was critical and that the new president might have no alternative but
to assume dictatorial power. Lippman had assumed that it would take a lot of coercing and pressure over the following months to get FDR to agree.

Little did he know that the newly minted president would need no cajoling.

What exactly did Franklin Roosevelt have in mind as he delivered his first inaugural address with America in the throes of the Depression?

Well, it's very likely the exact same sentiment that future Democratic operative Rahm Emanuel later expressed as “
Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

In his 1932 Commonwealth Club address, the more tactful Roosevelt
had said that the statesman's job was to redefine rights based on a “
changing and growing social order.” Conditions had changed during the Depression, he believed, and so government, as well as the rights it was charged with securing, would have to change, too.

Roosevelt's philosophy was perhaps best articulated by the man who helped author his first inaugural address. This little-known Columbia University professor, who would help form the inner intellectual sanctum of FDR's presidency—the “Brain Trust”—wrote of FDR:

He believed that government not only could, but should, achieve the subordination of private interests to collective interests, substitute co-operation for the mad scramble of selfish individualism. He had a profound feeling for the underdog, a real sense of the critical unbalance of economic life, a very keen awareness that political democracy could not exist
side by side with economic plutocracy.

The professor noted that, as with other “inglorious liberal[s]” in America, Roosevelt drew directly on the likes of Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly, and Walter Lippmann, among a
who's who of other progressives.

But, perhaps learning from the progressive titans before him, FDR knew he had a branding problem. The term
progressivism
was waning in the 1920s. The years between Wilson and FDR had witnessed America's return to its small-government roots under Presidents Harding and Coolidge. In foreign affairs, the horrors of World War I called into question the idealistic notion that mankind was becoming more humane and more perfect with each successive generation.

Progressivism was also being identified—rightly—with German philosophy, which had become far less appealing once the kaiser unleashed a calamitous war on the world. At home, the American economy was booming. So while Herbert Hoover had been technocratic
(like George W. Bush preceding Barack Obama, he laid the groundwork for programs that Roosevelt would later expand in crisis), progressivism receded.

All of this led to FDR's purposeful rebranding of the progressive ideology. During the 1932 Democratic National Convention, he explained, “Ours must be a party of
liberal
thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to
the greatest number of our citizens.”

FDR's new “liberalism” clearly betrayed the classical liberal thought of John Locke and Adam Smith, not to mention the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It was a noble lie, a label cynically reappropriated to obscure the total break from an older meaning and tradition that progressive ideology represented. This new interpretation of American politics and governance that elevated the state above the individual had begun under Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson, but it accelerated under FDR. Rights no longer came from the individual, much less God, but directly from government. This was everything that classical liberals had come to reject about the “divine right” of monarchs and the tendency of the state to trample individual liberty.

Before the 1930s,
liberalism
hadn't been a term used to describe any political group in the United States. But FDR, above all else, was a good marketer. Progressivism was now too closely associated with Wilson and failed third-party efforts. Adopting liberalism would also deprive Republicans of their intellectual heritage while associating progressivism directly with the nation's founding.