The Path to Power (47 page)

C
HAOS WAS THREATENING
even those farm areas that had once seemed most secure—areas such as the one that Lyndon Johnson’s Congressman represented. Revolt was flaring down on the Gulf. As the desperate winter of 1932 finally drew near its end, farmers applied to local banks for the usual seasonal loans for seed for the Spring planting—and were told that the banks had no money to lend. Soon the truth of that statement was demonstrated to them the hard way: a farmer who still had money in a bank would suddenly hear that the bank had closed.

To the farmers of South Texas, it was as if the very fabric of their society was ripping apart. One of the shuttered banks was the depository of the Corpus Christi School District; with the bank’s doors closed, the school doors closed. Other school districts, dependent on property tax payments, found that with tax payments so sharply down, there was no money for teachers’ salaries. Many children weren’t going to school, anyway; they had to work “off the farm,” work like field hands, for a nickel an hour. The education of their children had been so important to these farmers; now the children were no longer receiving an education.

Few farmers were free now from the dread of losing their homes. In 1933) only 38 percent of the farmers—about one out of every three—in once-prosperous Nueces County were able to pay their taxes; many were three years behind now, so penalties and interest had been piled atop the debt. And the abyss that gaped before them seemed bottomless. Farmers who had lost their land the year before had been able to go on relief, so that at least their families would not starve. Now relief organizations were all but out of funds. In February, the Corpus Christi branch of the Salvation Army announced that the last of its funds would be exhausted by the end of May.

Government couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help. Their local government was poor because they were poor. Their state government was dominated by what Populists called “the Interests.” In January, 1933, Nueces County farmers joined farmers from all over Texas in asking the Legislature for passage of a bill authorizing the issuance of bonds to raise money for relief funding; the bill was defeated. Eleven bills providing for a tax moratorium were introduced in the Legislature in January and February, 1933, by its small group of Populists; lumping all eleven bills together for easy handling, the Legislature defeated them on February 11—although, just a few days before, it had been informed that without a moratorium, tens of thousands of Texas families would shortly lose their farms. Hope for assistance from the national government had long since faded. And when the farmers realized that there was going to be no help from government, they decided to help themselves—even if it meant breaking the law. The first Tuesday of each month was “foreclosure day” in Corpus Christi: the day on which foreclosed farms were auctioned off on the steps of the Nueces County courthouse. Twenty-five farms were scheduled for auction on Tuesday, March 7. At a rally on February 25, more than 1,500 grim farmers, after being told by a speaker, “I know you are here to see that the masses of the land get justness and fairness and right,” vowed to be at the courthouse on March 7—with guns. Similar vows were being taken that week in county seats all across rural America. An entire nation was going up in flames, and its government seemed paralyzed; as James MacGregor Burns has written: “Crisis was in the air—but it was a strange, numbing crisis, striking suddenly in a Western city and then in the South a thousand miles away. It was worse
than an invading army; it was everywhere and nowhere, for it was in the minds of men. It was fear.”

O
N MARCH
2, as his train pulled into Washington, two of his sons lifted Franklin Delano Roosevelt to his feet and snapped his heavy iron braces into place so that he could stand. Resting his full weight on his sons, he swung his legs, so terribly thin under his trousers, forward in the motion—so hard for him that after only a minute of it, sweat stood out on his brow—that made people think he was walking, and came off the train in Union Station as the flashbulbs popped. And on March 4, he jerked those crippled legs onto the high white platform that had been erected before the Capitol—and told the nation that all it had to fear was fear itself. (During the speech, his face had been set and grim—“so grim,” reported Arthur Krock, “as to seem unfamiliar to those who have long known him.” But when it ended, he threw back his head and suddenly he smiled his great, confident smile.)

First, he ended the banking crisis.

Although every bank in America had closed in the early-morning hours before the Inaugural, most could reopen safely if only their depositors’ confidence was restored. In part, their confidence was restored by legislation. The Roosevelt administration’s first bill provided for the reopening of banks under Treasury Department licenses that in effect guaranteed their soundness; if a specific bank did not have sufficient funds, the Federal Reserve Board would lend funds against the bank’s assets. But mostly, their confidence was restored by
his
confidence. When he smiled on the crisis, it seemed to vanish. After the legislation had passed—in a single day—Franklin D. Roosevelt held, on March 12, his first “Fireside Chat.” “I want to talk for a few minutes … about banking,” he said. “When the people find out that they can get their money—that they can get it when they want it—the phantom of fear will soon be laid. … I can assure you that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress.” When the banks began reopening the next morning, the long lines were gone. Depositors put back their money so quickly, in fact, that in a single day the excess of deposits over withdrawals was more than $10 million in the Federal Reserve Districts alone.

Then he turned to the farm crisis.

That crisis was not weeks old, but decades—except for a few periods of prosperity such as that caused by the World War, the condition of America’s farmers had been worsening steadily for more than a century. But Roosevelt turned to it not reluctantly but with a will. On March 16, twelve days after he had taken office, he sent farm legislation, accompanied by a special message, to Congress.

The words of the message, five paragraphs long, were words that farmers—and their fathers and grandfathers—had been waiting all their
lives to hear. “At the same time that you and I are joining in emergency action to bring order to our banks,” he told Congress, “… I deem it of equal importance to take other and simultaneous steps. … One of these … seeks to increase the purchasing power of our farmers and … at the same time greatly relieve the pressure of farm mortgages. …”
Of equal importance
—of equal importance to
banks!
For generations, farmers had been begging their government to recognize their problems as it recognized those of institutions such as banks; they had been pleading for acknowledgment that they were as important to their government, as worthy of its help, as the institutions in which they deposited their money. Now, in a phrase, the recognition and the acknowledgment had been conferred.

Embodied in the bill were concepts for which farmers had long been pleading. It made provision at last for the reduction of the surplus that was ruin: farmers would be paid to take acreage out of production, the money for the payment to be raised by a tax on the processors and distributors and speculators who had grown rich off farmers. It made provision for “parity” (a synonym for “justice”). Said the bill’s Section 2—in words some elderly Populists could hardly believe they were reading:
“It is hereby declared to be the policy of Congress to establish and maintain such balance between the production and consumption of agricultural commodities … as will re-establish prices to farmers at a level … equivalent to the purchasing power … in the pre-war period. …”
Even more significant than the specific provisions was the tone of the five paragraphs, which contrasted so strongly with the pomposity of Hoover, and of Coolidge and Harding. He didn’t know whether what he was going to try would work, the new President said: “I tell you frankly that it is a new and untrod path.” But he was going to try. “I tell you with equal frankness that an unprecedented condition calls for the trial of new means.” And if these means didn’t work, he said, he would be the first to admit it. And then he would try something else.

And three weeks later, there was another message. Convinced by Progressives, the spiritual heirs of the People’s Party, that the first bill was not sufficient, Roosevelt sent up another. “I ask the Congress for specific legislation relating to the mortgage and other forms of indebtedness of the farmers of the nation,” he said. The proposed legislation was revolutionary in concept; it would use federal credit agencies to drive down the high interest rates that farmers were paying by refinancing their mortgages at 4 ½ percent, and it would give them longer to pay. The legislation was revolutionary—monumental—in scope: $2
billion
would be allocated for the plan. The legislation was ingenious; through a complicated arrangement that would ease the burden on the Treasury, banks and other mortgage holders could exchange unpaid mortgages for Federal Land Bank bonds paying interest at 4 percent, an exchange the banks would be happy to make, since it would guarantee them a 4 percent return, while at the moment they
were guaranteed only possession of farm land that no one would want to buy from them. And the legislation was only just:

Some of the Progressives felt he still hadn’t done enough. After all, the Populist Party had in 1892 asked also for currency inflation and for remonetization of silver; now Senators Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma and Burton K. Wheeler of Montana and others who had picked up the Populists’ fallen banner and had fought as the “farm bloc” all through the 1920’s took up those demands again. The tall, earnest Thomas, who had campaigned for William Jennings Bryan, said,

At first, Roosevelt balked. (“Burt,” he said to Wheeler, “Bryan killed the remonetization of silver in 1896.”) Then he compromised, accepting amendments providing for remonetization and a mild inflation. For five long weeks, the Senate tried to stall, but it couldn’t stand before him: said one Senator from a traditionally Republican state, “We gave Franklin D. Roosevelt a 160,000 majority. We had confidence in Franklin D. Roosevelt. We still have confidence in Franklin D. Roosevelt.” On May 10, the omnibus Farm Relief Act passed the Senate. On May 12, the President signed it into law. For decades, while their fortunes fell and fell, farmers had been asking for the measures embodied in that Farm Relief Act, and in all those years no action of lasting significance had been taken in their behalf. It hadn’t taken Franklin D. Roosevelt a Hundred Days to give them that action. He had needed only sixty-nine.

And on May 13, when Lyndon Johnson opened the usual letters from constituents asking for help, there was help available for him to give them.

T
HERE WAS
a desperate urgency to the task of the new Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Its mission was to reduce crops, and with every passing day, more crops were being planted as Spring spread north across America—the AAA was working against the sun. All the organizational problems that might be anticipated in a gigantic administrative machine created in such haste were present in the Agriculture Department’s huge South Building, where clerks were struggling to reduce a nation’s agriculture to millions of punched cards running over and over through automatic tabulating machines, each card representing a farmer, his farm, and his complex crop-reduction agreements with the government. Not even in existence in April, by the end of May the AAA had 5,000 employees; the seven-story South Building, as big as three city blocks, was a sea of desks, its miles of corridors crowded with delegations of cotton growers, wheat growers and dairymen, with packers and processors, with farm leaders and reporters. So bitter was an ideological split at the new agency’s upper levels between its traditionalist farmer-agrarians and its new visionary reformers and urban lawyers that both sides, as one observer noted, were using “that saddest and shabbiest of tricks employed by zealots within any organization—the trick of holding up papers or decisions at bottlenecks, or of burying them in details, or of trucking them out with such bureaucratic harness or baggage as delays or kills actions.” Power struggles were also virulent because the AAA was not under civil service, and a large number of politicians had found places in it. In the daily skirmishes, bureaus were shifted from one agency to another, or abolished entirely overnight, their work parceled out among other bureaus, which might or might not be informed of their new responsibilities. The AAA was “the despair,” in another’s words, “of everyone having to do with it,” a monstrous bureaucratic maze.