Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (51 page)

The political success of Roosevelt was due to quite other factors than the effectiveness of his economic measures, which were largely window-dressing, transposed by time into golden myth. He demonstrated the curious ability of the aristocratic
rentier
liberal (as opposed to self-made plebeians like Harding, Coolidge and Hoover) to enlist the loyalty and even the affection of the clerisy. Newspaper-owners opposed Roosevelt, but their journalists loved him, forgiving his frequent lies, concealing the fact that he took money off them at poker (which had damned Harding), obeying his malicious injunctions to give his Administration colleagues a ‘hard time’.
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There were dark corners in the Roosevelt White House: his own infidelities, his wife’s passionate attachments to another woman, the unscrupulous, sometimes vicious manner in which he used executive power.
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None was exposed in his lifetime or for long after. Even more important was his appeal to intellectuals, once the news he employed a ‘brains trust’ got about.
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In fact, of Roosevelt’s entourage only Harry Hopkins, a social worker not an intellectual as such, Rexford Tugwell and Felix Frankfurter were radical as well as influential; the two last disagreed violently, Tugwell being a Stalinist-type big-scale statist, Frankfurter an anti-business trust-buster, symbolizing in turn the First New Deal (1933–6) and the Second New Deal (1937–8), which were flatly contradictory.
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There was no intellectual coherence to the Roosevelt administration, but it seemed a place where the clerisy could feel at home. Among the able young who came to Washington were Dean Acheson, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, Adlai Stevenson, William Fulbright, Abe Fortas, Henry Fowler and, not least, Alger Hiss, who held meetings with four other New Deal members of a Communist cell in a Connecticut Avenue music studio.
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Attacks on Roosevelt served only to strengthen his appeal to the intelligentsia. A curious case in point was Mencken. In 1926 the
New York Times
had described him ‘the most powerful private citizen
in America’. Walter Lippmann called him ‘the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people’.
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A great part of his appeal lay in his ferocious attacks on presidents. Theodore Roosevelt was ‘blatant, crude, overly confidential, devious, tyrannical, vainglorious and sometimes quite childish’. Taft’s characteristic was ‘native laziness and shiftlessness’. Wilson was ‘the perfect model of the Christian cad’ who wished to impose ‘a Cossack despotism’. Harding was ‘a stonehead’, Coolidge ‘petty, sordid and dull… a cheap and trashy fellow … almost devoid of any notion of honour … a dreadful little cad’. Hoover had ‘a natural instinct for low, disingenuous, fraudulent manipulators’.
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These fusillades enthralled the intelligentsia and helped permanently to wound the reputations of the men at whom they were directed. Mencken excelled himself in attacking Roosevelt, whose whiff of fraudulent collectivism filled him with genuine outrage. He was ‘the Führer’, ‘the quack’, surrounded by ‘an astounding rabble of impudent nobodies’, ‘a gang of half-educated pedagogues, non-constitutional lawyers, starry-eyed uplifters and other such sorry wizards’, and his New Deal ‘a political racket’, ‘a series of stupendous bogus miracles’, with its ‘constant appeals to class envy and hatred’, treating government as ‘a milch-cow with 125 million teats’ and marked by ‘frequent repudiations of categorical pledges’.
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The only consequence of these diatribes was that Mencken forfeited his influence with anyone under thirty.

Intellectuals, indeed, relished the paranoia of the rich and the conventional, and the extraordinary vehemence and fertility of invention with which Roosevelt was assailed. His next-door neighbour at Hyde Park, Howland Spencer, called him ‘a frustrated darling’, a ‘swollen-headed nitwit with a Messiah complex and the brain of a boy scout’; to Senator Thomas Schall of Minnesota he was ‘a weak-minded Louis xiv’; Owen Young, Chairman of General Electric, claimed he ‘babbled to himself, Senator William Borah of Idaho that he spent his time in his study cutting out paper dolls. According to rumour (often surfacing in pamphlets), he was insane, weak-minded, a hopeless drug-addict who burst into hysterical laughter at press conferences, an impostor (the real Roosevelt was in an insane-asylum), under treatment by a psychiatrist disguised as a White House footman, and had to be kept in a straitjacket most of the time. It was said that bars had been placed in the windows to
prevent him from hurling himself out (the same rumour had arisen in Wilson’s last phase; the bars, in fact, had protected the children of Theodore Roosevelt). He was said to be suffering from an Oedipus complex, a ‘Silver Cord complex’, heart trouble, leprosy, syphilis, incontinence, impotency, cancer, comas and that his polio was inexorably ‘ascending into his head’. He was called a Svengali, a Little Lord Fauntleroy, a simpleton, a modern political Juliet ‘making love to the people from the White House balcony’, a pledge-breaker, a Communist, tyrant, oath-breaker, fascist, socialist, the Demoralizer, the Panderer, the Violator, the Embezzler, petulant, insolent, rash, ruthless, blundering, a sorcerer, an impostor, callow upstart, shallow autocrat, a man who encouraged swearing and ‘low slang’ and a ‘subjugator of the human spirit’.
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Crossing the Atlantic on the
Europa
, just before the 1936 election, Thomas Wolfe recorded that, when he said he was voting for the Monster,

… boiled shirts began to roll up their backs like window-shades. Maidenly necks which a moment before were as white and graceful as the swan’s became instantly so distended with the energies of patriotic rage that diamond dog-collars and ropes of pearls were snapped and sent flying like so many pieces of string. I was told that if I voted for this vile Communist, this sinister fascist, this scheming and contriving socialist and his gang of conspirators, I had no longer any right to consider myself an American citizen.
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It was against this background that Roosevelt won the greatest of electoral victories in 1936, by 27,477,000 to 16,680,000 votes, carrying all but two states (Maine and Vermont) and piling up enormous Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Roosevelt’s attraction for the young, the progressives and the intellectuals survived even the abandonment of New Deal innovations in 1938 and his collapse into the hands of the Big City Democratic machine bosses, who ensured his re-election in 1940 and 1944.

The truth is that Roosevelt appeared to be in tune with the Thirties spirit, which had repudiated the virtues of capitalist enterprise and embraced those of collectivism. The heroes of the 1920s had been businessmen, the sort of titans, led by Thomas Edison, who had endorsed Harding and Coolidge on their front porches. The 1929 crash and its aftermath weakened faith in this pantheon. By 1931 Felix Frankfurter was writing to Bruce Bliven, editor of the
New Republic:
‘Nothing I believe sustains the present system more than the pervasive worship of success and the touching faith we have in financial and business messiahs …. I believe it to be profoundly important to undermine that belief…. Undermine confidence in
their greatness and you have gone a long way towards removing some basic obstructions to the exploration of economic and social problems.’
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By 1932 this undermining process was largely complete, helped by revelations that J.P.Morgan, for instance, had paid no income-tax for the three previous years, and that Andrew Mellon had been coached by an expert from his own Treasury Department in the art of tax-avoidance.

Loss of faith in American business leaders coincided with a sudden and overwhelming discovery that the Soviet Union existed and that it offered an astonishing and highly relevant alternative to America’s agony. Stuart Chase’s
A New Deal
ended with the question: ‘Why should the Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?’
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The first Soviet Five Year Plan had been announced in 1928, but it was only four years later that its importance was grasped by American writers. Then a great spate of books appeared, praising Soviet-style planning and holding it up as a model to America. Joseph Freeman:
The Soviet Worker
, Waldo Frank:
Dawn in Russia
, William Z. Foster:
Towards Soviet America
, Kirby Page:
A New Economic Order
, Harry Laidler:
Socialist Planning
, Sherwood Eddy:
Russia Today: What Can We Learn From It?
all of them published in 1932, reinforced Lincoln Steffens’ best-selling pro-Soviet autobiography, which had appeared the year before, and introduced a still more influential tract,
The Coming Struggle for Power
by the British Communist John Strachey, which appeared in 1933.
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America was and is a millennarian society where overweening expectations can easily oscillate into catastrophic loss of faith. In the early 1930s there was net emigration. When Amtorg, the Soviet trading agency, advertised for 6,000 skilled workers, more than 100,000 Americans applied. To the comedian Will Rogers: ‘Those rascals in Russia, along with their cuckoo stuff have got some mighty good ideas…. Just think of everybody in a country going to work.’ ‘All roads in our day lead to Moscow,’ Steffens proclaimed; and Strachey echoed him: ‘To travel from the capitalist world into Soviet territory is to pass from death to birth.’ We must now explore the gruesome and unconscious irony of these remarks.

EIGHT
The Devils

At the very moment the American intelligentsia turned to totalitarian Europe for spiritual sustenance and guidance in orderly planning, it was in fact embarking on two decades of unprecedented ferocity and desolation – moral relativism in monstrous incarnation. On 21 December 1929 Stalin had celebrated his fiftieth birthday, as absolute master of an autocracy for which, in concentrated savagery, no parallel in history could be found. A few weeks earlier, while the New York Stock Exchange was collapsing, he had given orders for the forced collectivization of the Russian peasants, an operation involving far greater material loss than anything within the scope of Wall Street, and a human slaughter on a scale no earlier tyranny had possessed the physical means, let alone the wish, to bring about. By the time John Strachey wrote of fleeing capitalist death to find Soviet birth, this gruesome feat of social engineering had been accomplished. Five million peasants were dead; twice as many in forced labour camps. By that time, too, Stalin had acquired a pupil, admirer and rival in the shape of Hitler, controlling a similar autocracy and planning human sacrifices to ideology on an even ampler scale. For Americans, then, it was a case of moving from a stricken Arcadia to an active
pandaemonium.
The devils had taken over.

When Lenin died in 1924 his autocracy was complete and Stalin, as General Secretary of the Party, had already inherited it. All that remained was the elimination of potential rivals for sole power. For this Stalin was well equipped. This ex-seminarist and revolutionary thug was half-gangster, half-bureaucrat. He had no ideals; no ideological notions of his own. According to the composer Shostakovich, Stalin wanted to be tall, with powerful hands. The court painter Nalbandian satisfied this wish by fixing the angle of vision from below and getting his master to fold his hands over his stomach; several other portrait painters were shot.
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Stalin was only five foot four inches tall, thin, swarthy and with a pockmarked face. A Tsarist
police description of him, compiled when he was twenty-two, noted that the second and third toes of his left foot were fused together; and in addition an accident as a boy caused his left elbow to be stiff, with a shortening of the arm, the left hand being noticeably thicker than the right. As Shostakovich said, he kept hiding his right hand. Bukharin, two years before he was murdered, said that in his view Stalin suffered bitterly from these disabilities and from real or imagined intellectual incapacity. ‘This suffering is probably the most human thing about him’; but it led him to take revenge on anyone with higher capacities: ‘There is something diabolical and inhuman about his compulsion to take vengeance for this same suffering on everybody …. This is a small, vicious man; no, not a man, but a devil.’
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Stalin did not have Lenin’s ideological passion for violence. But he was capable of unlimited violence to achieve his purposes, or indeed for no particular reason; and he sometimes nursed feelings of revenge against individuals for years before executing them. He served his apprenticeship in large-scale violence as Chairman of the North Caucasus Military District in 1918, when he decided to act against his ‘bourgeois military specialists’ whom he suspected of lack of enthusiasm for killing. The chief of staff of the district, Colonel Nosovich, testified: ‘Stalin’s order was brief, “Shoot them!” …. A large number of officers … were seized by the Cheka and immediately shot without trial.’
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At the time Stalin also complained of all three Red Army commanders in the area sent to him by Trotsky and later held this as a grudge against him. He had them all murdered in 1937–9.
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