Roosevelt (33 page)

March 10, 1933, H. M. Talburt, New York
World-Telegram,
Scripps-Howard Newspapers

“How do you account for him?” William Allen White wrote to Ickes that spring. “Was I just fooled in him before the election, or has he developed? As Governor of New York, I thought he was a good two-legged Governor of a type that used to flourish in the first decade of the century under the influence of La Follette and Roosevelt. We had a lot of them but they weren’t presidential size.…

“I thought your President was one of those. Instead of which he developed magnitude and poise, more than all, power! I have been a voracious feeder in the course of a long and happy life and have eaten many things, but I have never had to eat my words before. I shall wait six months and … if they are still on the plate, down they go with a gusto. And I shall smack my lips as my Adams apple bobs.”

D
URING THE FIRST
half of his first term Roosevelt tried a Grand Experiment in government. He took the role of national father, of bipartisan leader, of President of all the people. Playing this role with consummate skill, he extracted from it the last morsel of political power and government action. Eventually his biparty leadership was to falter, and he would turn in new directions. But during these first two years, 1933 and 1934, he savored the heady feeling of rising above parties and groups and acting almost as a constitutional monarch armed with political power.

The New Deal, the President told a Wisconsin crowd in August 1934, “seeks to cement our society, rich and poor, manual worker and brain worker, into a voluntary brotherhood of freemen, standing together, striving together, for the common good of all.” Such government would not hurt honest business, he said; in seeking social justice it would not rob Peter to pay Paul. Government, he told a convention of bankers two months later, was “essentially the outward expression of the unity and leadership of all groups.” His own role as president? It was “to find among many discordant elements that unity of purpose that is best for the Nation as a whole.” Throughout Roosevelt’s speeches of 1934 ran this theme of government as conciliator, harmonizer, unifier of all major interests. He was the master broker among the many interests of a great and diverse people.

As president of all the people Roosevelt tried to stay above the political and ideological battles that raged all around him. Insisting that he did not want to be drawn into controversy, he asked his supporters to take over the burden of answering attacks on the New Deal from the extreme right or left. He was forever acting as umpire between warring administrators or congressmen. When his advisers differed over policy he time and again ordered: “Put them in a room together, and tell them no lunch until they agree!” When Tugwell and Senator Copeland were at swords’ points over food and drug legislation, the President suggested that they battle it out together while he sat in and held the sponge. He told his agency
chiefs that he was operating between the 15 per cent on the extreme left and the 15 per cent on the extreme right who were opposing him for political reasons or “from pure cussedness.” He insisted that he was going neither right nor left—just down the middle.

The country enjoyed a brief era of good feelings, and presiding jauntily over the era was Roosevelt himself. While the New Deal came in for some sharp criticism, everybody, it seemed, loved the President. William Randolph Hearst was a guest at the White House. The Scripps-Howard newspapers lauded his New Deal. Pierre Du Pont and other businessmen wrote him friendly letters. Farm leaders rallied to the cause. “To us,” wrote Ed O’Neal of the American Farm Bureau Federation, “you are the Andrew Jackson of the Twentieth Century, championing the rights of the people.…” Father Coughlin defended him. William Green and other leaders of labor had little but words of praise for the man in the White House. Across the seas a man who seemed to love nobody had a good word for him. “I have sympathy with President Roosevelt,” remarked Adolf Hitler in mid-1933, “because he marches straight to his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.”

Some Democrats could not understand Roosevelt’s nonpartisan line. When one of them naävely suggested early in 1934 that the President come to a celebration for the Democratic party’s patron saint, the President gently rebuked him. He would take no part in Jefferson Day celebrations that year: “Our strongest plea to the country in this particular year of grace,” he said, “is that the recovery and reconstruction program is being accomplished by men and women of all parties—that I have repeatedly appealed to Republicans as much as to Democrats to do their part.” Much as he loved Jefferson, it would be better if “nonpartisan Jefferson dinners” should be held, with as many Republicans as Democrats on the banquet committees. He made no objection to a nationwide tribute to himself on the occasion of his birthday, in the interest of crippled children.

Republican party leaders were perplexed too. During the first months they were content to mute their protests and to bask in the patriotic posture of “country before party.” But slowly the party emerged from its torpor. Its task was formidable at best. Republican leadership had been decimated in two national elections. Living almost in oblivion, Hoover was a scapegoat even for his own party, and the Republican leaders in Congress seemed pedestrian and heavy-footed next to the lustrous, fast-moving figure in the White House. By early 1934 they were trying hard to act as a real opposition party.

A MASTER OF BOTH INSTRUMENTS, NOV. 18, 1934, Edwin Marcus, reprinted by permission of the New York
Times

But what were they to oppose? A cardinal aspect of Roosevelt’s nonpartisanship was his quarterbacking now on the right, now on the left, now down the center of the political field. As in the 1932 campaign, he did not leave an opening at either end of his line through which the Republicans could try to carry the ball. Indeed, the Grand Old Party itself tended to split into factions to the right and to the left of the President’s erratic middle-of-the-road course. Despite their minority position in the party, the progressive Republicans like Norris and McNary had the advantage of White House smiles and favors.

A remarkable aspect of this situation was that Roosevelt continued in 1934 to take a more moderate and conservative stand on policy than did the majority of congressmen. On silver, on inflation, on mortgage refinancing, on labor, on spending, Congress was to the left of the President. In contrast with later periods, Roosevelt’s main job in 1933 and 1934 was not to prod Congress into action, but to ride the congressional whirlwind by disarming the extremists, by seeking unity among the blocs, and by using every presidential weapon of persuasion and power.

The classic test of greatness in the White House has been the chief executive’s capacity to lead Congress. Weak presidents have been those who had no program to offer, or whose proposals have been bled away in the endless twistings and windings of the legislative process. Strong presidents have been those who finessed or bulldozed their programs through Congress and wrote them into legislative history. By this classic test Roosevelt—during his first years in the White House—was a strong President who dominated Congress with a masterly show of leadership.

If Roosevelt had ever stopped during these turbulent days to list his methods of dealing with Congress, the result might have looked something like this:

1. Full use of constitutional powers, such as the veto
   
2. Good timing
   
3. Drafting of measures in the executive branch
   
4. Almost constant pressure, adroitly applied
   
5. Careful handling of patronage
   
6. Face-to-face persuasiveness with legislative leaders
   
7. Appeal to the people.
   

But it would have been out of character for the President to catalogue his methods in such systematic fashion. He cheerfully played the legislative game by ear, now trying this device and now that, as the situation dictated.

He experimented even with a policy of hands off for a short period. Late in March 1934 the President ostentatiously left Washington for two weeks of deep-sea fishing off the Bahamas. White House pressure was relaxed. Soon Congress was looking like a schoolroom of disorderly boys with the master gone. A wrangle broke out among Democrats over regulation of stock exchanges. Over one hundred representatives, breaking away from their leaders, lined up in favor of a mortgage refinancing bill so inflationary that Roosevelt sent word to Garner and Rayburn from his yacht to tell Congress “if this type of wild legislation passed the responsibility for wrecking recovery will be squarely on the Congress, and I will not hesitate to say so to the nation in plain language.” Garner said that in thirty years he had never seen the House in such abject turmoil.

The hands-off experiment was a dismal failure. Welcomed by a group of congressmen on his return Roosevelt remarked pointedly that he had learned some lessons from the barracuda and sharks. He added with a smile, “I am a tough guy.”

The presidential reins were tightened, but the President never got really tough. He depended mainly on conferences with congressional leaders to put across his program. He even denied that there was such a thing as “must legislation.”

“The word ‘must’ is a terrible word,” he told reporters. “I would not use ‘must’ to Congress. I never have, have I?” he finished amid laughter.

His formal constitutional powers in legislation Roosevelt exploited to the hilt. Reviving Wilson’s practice, he delivered his reports on the state of the union to Congress in person. He outlined general proposals in well-timed messages, and he followed these up by detailed legislative proposals drafted in the executive departments and introduced by friendly congressmen. Individual legislators were drawn into the executive policy-making process not as representatives of Congress nor of their constituencies, but as members of the administration. The President met frequently with congressional leaders and committee chairmen, and occasionally with other members of Congress. In practice he fashioned a kind of “master-ministry” of bureaucrats and congressmen with Roosevelt at the top.

The President could say no, too. During his first two years he used his veto powers to a far greater extent than the average of all the previous presidents. Many of the vetoed bills involved special legislation, which Roosevelt had his assistants scrutinize carefully. More important than the veto was the President’s threat to use it. Again and again he sent word through congressional leaders that he would turn down a pending bill unless it was changed. On one occasion in 1934, when Congress passed an immigration bill that seemed to Roosevelt filled with inequities, he simply proposed that the two Houses pass a concurrent resolution of recall—otherwise he would veto the bill. Only once did the Seventy-third Congress override Roosevelt; this occasion followed a legislative revolt against the President’s economy program.

Roosevelt played the patronage game tirelessly and adroitly. Major appointments were allotted on the basis of lists the President drew up of “our friends” in various states; an opponent he carefully designated simply as “not with me.” Routine jobs he turned over to Farley. Thousands of applicants besieged Farley in his office and hotel until the Postmaster General had to sneak back and forth to his office as if he were dodging a sheriff’s writ. Farley flouted custom by openly accepting and systematizing patronage procedures. When his outer office became packed, he calmly went about the room followed by a stenographer taking the name of each person and the kind of job he wanted. Only because the new emergency agencies were hiring employees outside the classified
civil service (about a hundred thousand such jobs by July 1934) was Farley able to take care of the host of deserving Democrats.

Congressmen wanted jobs too, and the President saw that they got them. When a delegation of Democratic representatives complained to him about the treatment they had got on patronage from departments, he promptly asked the cabinet to be as helpful as possible with congressmen on this matter. The President was shrewd enough, however, to postpone job distribution during the first session long enough to apply the test of administration support, with the result, it was said, that “his relations with Congress were to the end of the session tinged with a shade of expectancy which is the best part of young love.”