Roosevelt (62 page)

Another explanation of Roosevelt’s loss of leadership over Congress was quite simple. The President’s popularity with the voters, it was pointed out, had slipped considerably during the Roosevelt recession, and congressmen were jumping off the presidential bandwagon as soon as they found this drop in their own constituencies. That explanation, too, had some merit; on the other hand, Roosevelt had lost the court fight before the recession and at a time
when his personal popularity was still high. Moreover, his standing with the people had slipped badly during the first term—only to rise again in 1936. No congressman could dare count on continued unpopularity for the resilient politician in the White House.

What, then, could explain the revolt in Congress? It was not surprising that the real explanation eluded the observers of the day. Only as Roosevelt’s first term fell into fuller perspective and as the precise nature of his relations with Congress during that period was revealed did the basic situation become clear. The essence of the situation was this: Roosevelt had led Congress during his first term by his adroit and highly personal handling of congressional leaders and by exploiting the sense of crisis; but, intent on immediate tactical gains on Capitol Hill, he had neglected to build up a position of strength with the rank and file of Congress.

With his usual pragmatism, Roosevelt at the outset had faced up to the hard facts of the distribution of power in Congress. Since committee chiefs had power, he would deal with committee chiefs. And he did so with such charm, such tact, such flexibility, such brilliant timing, such sensitivity to the leaders’ own political problems that the President’s personal generalship often meant the difference between passage and defeat of key bills. Time and time again he won the support of men like Glass and Harrison and Tydings and Sumners and Doughton not because they liked the New Deal in general or the measure in particular but because they liked and were willing to defer to the man who was President. Roosevelt’s leadership talents lay in his ability to shift quickly and gracefully from persuasion to cajolery to flattery to intrigue to diplomacy to promises to horse-trading—or to concoct just that formula which his superb instincts for personal relations told him would bring around the most reluctant congressman.

“It is probably safe to say,” said onetime presidential assistant Stanley High, “that during 1933, 1934, and 1935 a record-breaking number of men of some political eminence went to the President’s office in a state of incipient revolt and left it to declare to the world their subscription to things that they did not subscribe to.”

A good method while it worked—and it did work for four years. The supreme test of that method came in the second Hundred Days. To put through a restless and bewildered Congress the enduring legislation of the New Deal at the fag end of the 1935 session was the ultimate tribute to Roosevelt’s capacity to prod and charm and reason balking legislators into acting.

But there was a price to pay. Boiling under the surface even while the great measures thrashed their way through Congress was a deep bitterness toward the White House. Men like Glass deserted the administration as the program of 1935 revealed the shape of
things to come. Even loyalists like Byrnes complained that they had had to “swallow a lot” for the White House; they were close to the breaking point. As Roosevelt in his foxlike fashion crossed and recrossed his own trail in maneuvering his bills through Congress, congressmen had to reverse positions and cover up for the White House. They had to take the rap—and they were tired of taking the rap.

Bitterness was sharpest in the House. Administration supporters there complained to Roosevelt that party organization and discipline were nonexistent. The Democratic Steering Committee—the logical link between the President and his partisans in the House—was virtually ignored by the White House. When Hopkins held a peace conference with this committee in July 1935, member after member rose to excoriate the administration’s flouting of rank-and-filers, to complain about appointments, even to threaten reprisal against the White House.

Roosevelt’s breathing spell of late 1935, his limited legislative program for 1936, and the closing of ranks in the campaign staved off rebellion for a time. But the President’s effort to carry out his program to help the needy one-third of the people precipitated the new and sterner battles of the second term.

Had the New Deal, then, really been dealt? Was it all over? What about the scores of young New Dealers washed into Congress by the Roosevelt tidal wave of 1936? Were not they the makings of congressional majorities for an expanded New Deal?

They might have served this purpose—but they never had the chance. For another price that Roosevelt had to pay for his dependence on the old ranking Democrats was the consolidation of the powers of these leaders in Congress. He had confirmed their political status, their high-priority claims on administration favors, their near monopoly of access to the White House. He had failed to encourage rank-and-file organization in Congress behind a New Deal program.

When Pittsburgh Democratic boss David Lawrence wanted to bring in three new Democratic congressmen to meet the President early in 1937, Roosevelt put him off, finally allotted three minutes, and then postponed even this appointment. “There is a group of aggressive progressive Democrats who have stuck by you through thick and thin, about seventy-five in number, as well as a number of other progressives not classed as Democrats,” Representative Kent Keller wrote the President in April 1938, “and I do not believe that you have ever called in a single one of this group in consultation as to administration policies.” Roosevelt, he said, was dealing only with a small group of congressional leaders.
Characteristically the President told McIntyre, “Have him come in to see me.” But things went on as before; the rank and file remained adrift. When a year later another friendly congressman urged him to establish contact with the rank and file by inviting them to the White House in small groups, the President replied that he would like to do this but his day was simply too crowded.

The President hoped that the Democratic legislators would remain responsible to the party platform of 1936. The congressmen, however, had had little part in drawing up the platform. They felt responsible to the majorities that had elected them in their districts; in any event, it was the voters in their districts who would determine whether or not they would stay in Congress. And not only this; something of tremendous importance was happening throughout the mid-1930’s within the American electorate.

It is often said that a coalition of labor and farm groups created the New Deal. But this can be reversed. It is just as true—and of greater significance—that the New Deal helped create a new labor movement and a new farm movement in America, along with a dozen other immensely strengthened groups. And it was this massive swelling in the size and number and strength of politically oriented groups that changed decisively the pattern of power in counties and townships and wards and precincts, where congressmen were elected and defeated.

Labor was the most striking case in point. Sapped and crippled by depression, the unions had recruited millions of new members with the help of Section 7a and the Wagner Act. By 1937 the Committee for Industrial Organization had broken completely with the AFL and was gathering in millions of workers in steel, autos, rubber, electrical goods, and other mass-production industries. As fiery young leaders debouched from the ranks, unions took on a new militance and a new exhilaration. Contributing its funds and ordering its organizers into the precincts, the CIO had given Roosevelt’s re-election campaign a mighty boost. Then, for month after month, the country had seen turbulent labor erupting in mass demonstrations, sit-down strikes, quickie stoppages, parades, police violence.

Striding across the front pages of the nation’s newspapers was the new army’s glowering, blustering commander, John L. Lewis. “The Huey Long of labor,” Huey himself had called him, and no one could have better personalized Roosevelt’s political predicament in his second term than the burly, pug-faced CIO chief. By 1938 Lewis was seething over Roosevelt’s “ingratitude.” For all his denunciations of businessmen, Lewis had a commercial approach to politics. The President, he felt, should pay off for favors granted. But what had Roosevelt done? He had taken a neutral stand during
the period of sit-down strikes with his famous statement, “A plague on both your houses.” He had publicly rebuked Lewis for demanding White House recognition of its 1936 friends. The President, Lewis growled, was even stealing his lieutenants—especially Sidney Hillman—away from him by giving them government jobs and drawing them into the charmed White House circle. Roosevelt and Hopkins, he complained, were balking CIO efforts to organize WPA workers. Where, demanded Lewis, was the pay-off?

Conflict between the two men was inevitable even if they both had not been prima donnas. To speak and act for his followers, Lewis had to move toward leftist politics and direct action. Roosevelt, with a different constituency and needing support in Congress, had to continue his delicate balancing act among power blocs. Lewis derided Roosevelt’s public role as a great humanitarian and forthright fighter for the underdog; Roosevelt, he said, was weak, tricky, and lacking in conviction. Distrusting the mine leader, and fearing that he would disrupt the coalition, Roosevelt struck out at him at critical moments. And Lewis, fighting for his organization’s life during the crucial organizing drives, recoiled from what he called Roosevelt’s “catlike scratches.”

If farmers lacked such a spectacular leader to dramatize their claims, they presented an even better case than labor of the New Deal’s impact on groups. Indeed, rarely has an organization owed its power more directly to governmental action than the strongest farm group, the American Farm Bureau Federation. For the thousands of county farm bureaus that made up the Federation had originally been established as semigovernmental units, and their extension agents took on much of the practical administration of the New Deal farm programs at the same time that they served as unofficial recruiting officers for the Federation. As the farm programs expanded, so did the Federation’s membership, which more than doubled between 1933 and 1938.

The Federation’s relation to the New Deal was curious: administratively it was geared in with programs, while politically it could operate as an independent force, putting pressure on Roosevelt and Wallace. Other farm groups were active too. The commodity associations burgeoned as the New Deal poured benefits into the hands of woolgrowers, beet sugar raisers, pork producers, cattle raisers, peanut growers, and a host of other groups. And the bigger the association, the more pressure it could turn on Washington.

The situation was duplicated in other sectors of American life. The WPA brought into being the Workers Alliance, whose leaders—some of them members of the Communist party—were agitating noisily for more and bigger work projects. The National Youth Administration was a focus of interest for youth groups. Lending
and housing programs stimulated a host of associations linked to these activities. Government lawyers had a large part in forming the National Lawyers’ Guild, as a rival group to the conservative American Bar Association.

“You know,” Roosevelt said to
Nation
editor Max Lerner in 1938, “this is really a great country. The framework of democracy is so strong and so elastic that it can get along and absorb a Huey Long and a John L. Lewis.” A perceptive remark—but an incomplete one. While powerful new forces were straining within the Grand Coalition, while these forces were acting like a centrifuge that spun locally elected congressmen into their separate orbits, forcible leadership was all the more necessary in the White House as a focus for the national interest, as a rallying point for the liberal majority, and as a unifying force for government action. This was the supreme crisis of leadership that Roosevelt faced in the spring of 1938.

“There is no question,” Roosevelt wrote Ambassador Biddle in Warsaw late in 1937, “that the German-Italian-Japanese combination is being amazingly successful—bluff, power, accomplishment or whatever it may be.” The President could not say the same about his own foreign policy making. Stalled on the domestic front, he faced formidable congressional opposition in his efforts to awaken the country to the rising dangers abroad. Indeed, Roosevelt’s handling of foreign policy making was especially ineffective because there his program and strategy were even more opportunistic than at home.

The President of course had definite opinions about certain aspects of the international situation. The aggressions of Italy, Japan, and Germany were to him simply “armed banditry,” and he was not reluctant to say so in private. He wished—again privately—for “more spine” in the British Foreign Office. Squarely opposing the idea of peace at any price, he wanted co-operation among the democratic nations to save the peace. But on crucial operating questions concerning the kind of international co-operation, the extent of German-Italian-Japanese participation in peace programs, and above all the commitments to be undertaken by the United States, he was uncertain. In late 1937 and 1938 he was still searching for a peace formula, with his eye always cocked on the barons of isolationism on Capitol Hill.

Following the disappointing reaction to his “quarantine” speech in October 1937, Roosevelt tried again to take the initiative, although in a different direction. He had long toyed with the idea of
sponsoring a dramatic meeting at sea of chiefs of state. Late in October he decided the time was ripe for a somewhat less spectacular move—an Armistice Day meeting of all diplomatic representatives in the White House, to hear a message from the President. Based on suggestions from Under Secretary Sumner Welles, who had been working closely with the President and somewhat independently of Hull, the message would propose a new effort to reach agreement on basic principles of peaceful international relations, on ways of giving all peoples access on equal terms to the world’s raw materials, on methods of changing international agreements peacefully, and on the rights and obligations of neutrals in the unhappy event of war. Surely a moderate program—except for the suggestion of treaty revision to remove certain inequities of Versailles.