The Plots Against the President (16 page)

Most of the New Deal was aggressively defensive, a hodgepodge of reforms to keep America from falling apart. But a significant part of the legislation was also driven by Roosevelt's dream to build a “balanced civilization,” to confirm that government had an obligation to its citizenry, and to eliminate the possibility of a future depression. He had a Jeffersonian agrarian nostalgia—harking back to his tranquil childhood—in which he envisioned a world where Americans thrived in peaceful landscapes rather than industrialized cities. As governor of New York he had sought to shift “the population balance between city and countryside,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in
The Coming of the New Deal
, “taking industry from crowded urban centers to airy villages, and giving scrawny kids from the slums opportunity for sun and growth in the country.” He saw himself as steward of the land and, in Jeffersonian terms, as guardian over a government that provided the greatest good for the greatest number. Simply put, he wanted to shape a better life for all Americans while conserving the land for future generations.

Much of the legislation was also directly paradoxical. Some programs were deflationary while others were inflationary, for instance. Roosevelt was aware of the “contradictory character of some of his policies,” according to his son Elliott. “The administration was wedded to no economic philosophy. It was pragmatic in outlook. What it sought was to put people back to work, to raise prices, and to lighten the debt load.” The overall effect was one of
emergency
, and more carefully considered bills would supersede much of the legislation down the road, once the economy stabilized.

The Hundred Days was a breathtaking period in which American society and government was restructured. Steeped in regulation and federal expenditures, the new bills changed the balance of power and gave Roosevelt unprecedented and virtually unbridled authority. Declaring a state of national emergency and assuming full responsibility for the government, the patrician reformer forever altered the role of the U.S. president and signed the largest peacetime appropriations bills in the country's history. We were “confronted with a choice between an orderly revolution—a peaceful and rapid departure from past concepts,” wrote Tugwell, “and a violent and disorderly overthrow of the whole capitalist structure.” The seamlessness with which the executive and legislative branches collaborated—under dire circumstances and a perilous time constraint—was unmatched. Roosevelt thanked the exhausted representatives profusely, and in the wee hours of June 16, 1933, the most productive Congress in American history adjourned.

No one would ever know “how close were we to collapse and revolution,” U.S. Army General Hugh S. Johnson later said. “We could have got a dictator a lot easier than Germany got Hitler.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

Hankering for Superman

The motion picture industry and commercial newsreel firms jumped on the Roosevelt bandwagon, exploiting his on-screen charisma—and calling him “the Barrymore of the capital”—to produce propaganda films and short documentaries about America's savior. Even before his inauguration, the industry had begun preparing the country for a radical takeover of government. Spawned by the fear of violent mobs of unemployed men blanketing the nation, this dictator craze, fueled by Hollywood and right-wing media moguls, set off an idealistic yearning for a benevolent despot—what Walter Lippmann called a “hankering for Superman” and another described as “a rage for order.”

Hollywood was at the ready with a string of politically charged features about economic injustice, governmental fraud, revolutionary fervor, class hatred, mob hysteria, and the tyrannical white-knight heroes who came to the rescue. Frank Capra's
American Madness
depicted a frenzied mass of depositors rushing a bank in what the
New York World Telegram
described as “one of the most excitingly realistic mob scenes ever pictured on the screen.” In
Wild Boys of the Road
a roving quartet of teenage misfits thrown into destitution and rootlessness by economic conditions wander the country looking for redemption. As their road trip unfolds, hundreds of juvenile hoboes join them, sending the unmistakable message that America has abandoned its children. Rousted about by police and railroad “bulls,” the hungry, unemployed teens are a heartbreaking lot.

In Cecil B. DeMille's
This Day and Age
, an ominous collection of teen vigilantes, disgusted by the depravity of adult politics and culture, form a bloodthirsty gang. Most discomfiting were the rousing cheers of moviegoers during a scene when the mob's target is bound by rope and lowered into a pit of rats. “The public has been milked and are growing tired of it,” DeMille proclaimed in justification of his gratuitously violent film. “It is not [financial] speculation alone. There is something rotten at the core of our system.”

The most incendiary of the films was the overnight sensation
The Three Little Pigs
, with its memorably eerie song, “Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf.” Screened throughout the spring and summer of 1933 to standing-room-only crowds, the eight-minute Walt Disney cartoon came to symbolize the threat of the Great Depression and the unshakable hope for deliverance. “The whimsical tale follows the adventures of a trio of pigs who experiment with three progressively sturdier options in home building materials (straw, wood, and bricks),” wrote Thomas Doherty in his academic treatise
Pre-Code Hollywood
, “and their respective resistance to the lung power of a lupine predator.” The unmistakable moral of the fable was that the huffing and puffing predatory wolf could be kept at bay with “sound reconstruction policies and honest statecraft.” No film in American history had so emblemized the political environment of fortitude in the face of terror. Its theme song became “an alternate national anthem,” according to one historian, “sung, hummed, and whistled on trains and buses, in taxis and hotels.” The audience in a Texas movie theater nearly rioted when management forgot to show the cartoon.

At the same time, breadlines, hunger marchers, mobs of unemployed veterans, strikers, and hobo camps dominated the newsreels and wirephotos, inciting the very fear President Roosevelt had warned against in his inaugural address. After his inauguration—the first to be recorded with sound—the newsreels played a crucial role in championing both the president and the New Deal. In Fox Movietone's
The Inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt
, which played in theaters across the land and often received top marquee billing, the narrator momentously proclaims that the “hour of destiny has struck.” Several melodramatic newsreels came in the following weeks, including Hearst Metrotone's
Roosevelt: The Man of the Hour
and Universal's
The Fighting President
(with its tagline “Show Us the Way and We Will Follow”), complete with robust nationalistic marching music. Hollywood, recognizing Roosevelt and the New Deal as the box-office saviors, embraced its role as chief booster. Studio executives formed a committee to bolster the White House by creating propaganda films and enlisting the support of the nation's movie theaters. “Stand by your president,” trailers intoned at the beginning of film projections. “President Roosevelt is doing a great job. He is restoring order out of banking chaos … Our lot may be tough, but his is tougher, so let us all help him as best we can.”

The only film to capture the first hundred days during which America wobbled on the verge of anarchy was
Gabriel Over the White House
. Media mogul William Randolph Hearst bought the rights to the script and financed the controversial film, which was an unabashed glorification of totalitarian dictatorship. Written by a British novelist, it was adapted as a screenplay with a Rooseveltian figure and released in theaters shortly after Roosevelt's inauguration. The film's over-the-top propagandistic elements were alternately decried as Fascist, Socialist, liberal, or reactionary, capturing the radically fluid nature of the moment. “Just as American communists looked dewy-eyed toward Joseph Stalin and the future that worked in the Soviet Union,” wrote one scholar, “homegrown authoritarians yearned for potent stewardship and doted on images of ordered men marching together in sharp uniforms.” Hearst was just such a man, one who firmly believed that America needed a dictator and took seriously his self-appointed mandate to shape public opinion. Having first backed Roosevelt's Democratic opponent the previous summer, he moved swiftly to curry favor with the new president and help him chart a despotic course.

Hearst enlisted Roosevelt's creative input, sending him a copy of the script, complete with Hearst's own annotated edits, before the movie went into production. The plot begins benignly enough, with a hack politician ascending to the presidency. Played by Walter Huston—father of John Huston and grandfather of Anjelica Huston—the fictional president Jud Hammond is a handsome lightweight who is the genial front man for behind-the-scenes party powerbrokers. He makes no pretense of wielding real power, as scenes show him playing on the floor with his young nephew, oblivious to the background radio blaring reports of poverty and unemployment. Elected to office on promises he has no intention of honoring, Hammond smiles blankly when an aide reminds him, “Oh, don't worry, by the time they realize you're not keeping them, your term will be over.” A feckless playboy, Hammond directs his passion toward his secretary—a thinly veiled reference to Roosevelt's extramarital affair with his wife's secretary, Lucy Mercer—and driving fast cars, an analogy to Roosevelt's enthusiasm for sailing and yachting.

The story takes a dramatic turn when the boyishly irresponsible Hammond drives speedily away from a pack of motorcycle-riding journalists. His car careens out of control after a tire blowout at a hundred miles per hour, landing him in a coma with a terminal prognosis. Given up for dead back in his sumptuous White House bedroom, he receives a visit from Gabriel—the archangel of revelations—at the moment of his passing. Like Roosevelt overcoming polio, Hammond arises from his deathbed a changed man. His previously vacant eyes are now brimming with intensity, symbolizing his metamorphosis from empty suit to divinely inspired autocrat. In a dizzying series of executive actions, he seizes control of the government; calls Congress into a special session and orders it to take “immediate and effective action”; declares martial law; prohibits the military from attacking the fictional version of the Bonus Army; muscles in on the liquor racket of an Al Capone–like hoodlum by nationalizing the sale and distribution of alcohol; oversees the execution by firing squad of the Capone gang after a court-martial conviction; creates an “Army of Construction” to put the unemployed to work; rallies the public with a series of radio addresses; threatens to destroy any European nation that reneges on its war debt; fires his cabinet of old, white Wall Street patsies; allocates billions of dollars in New Deal–style social and public works programs; and disarms the world, bringing about global peace.

Understandably, he falls away exhausted. In a final scene, Hammond can barely summon the energy to raise the quill pen Abraham Lincoln used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Taking pen to paper to sign the historic legislation that has been enacted under his direction, he is struck by a fatal heart attack as the famous quill scratches across the page. He is eulogized as “one of the greatest presidents who ever lived.”

“The good news: he reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress, and brings about world peace,” reads the Library of Congress description of the presidential character in the film. “The bad news: he's Mussolini … Depending on your perspective, it's a strident defense of democracy and the wisdom of the common man, a good argument for benevolent dictatorship, a prescient anticipation of the New Deal, [or] a call for theocratic governance.”

Hearst had intended the movie to prepare both Roosevelt and the nation for the necessity for decisive executive action. The original screenplay included a scene in which the president was shot at, but after the Miami assassination attempt, it was deemed to be too close to reality and was deleted. “I want to send you this line to tell you how pleased I am with the changes you made in ‘Gabriel Over the White House,' ” President Roosevelt wrote to Hearst in April after he had viewed the film in a private screening. “I think it is an intensely interesting picture and should do much to help.”

Left-leaning magazines dismissed it as an instructional effort to convert Americans to the benefits of Fascism. Nascent Hollywood censors declared, “Its reality is a dangerous item at this time,” and MGM boss Louis B. Mayer was infuriated upon viewing the film that his studio had produced. “Put that picture back in the can, take it back to the studio, and lock it up,” he reportedly told an associate, though it was already in distribution.

While Hearst saw the film as a fantastic primer, Roosevelt ultimately came to regard it as fantasy entertainment, and the American public—riveted by Roosevelt's movie-star looks and larger-than-life exploits—felt no need for a dramatized version. Despite its backing by the tycoon, the film was a box-office flop throughout the country. The deifying of Roosevelt through newsreels continued in Hollywood, but Hearst soon broke with the president, disappointed that his “protégé” had a mind of his own and had failed to follow the script to its letter.

Chapter Twenty-eight

That Jew Cripple in the White House

In a few short months, those who had been begging Roosevelt to become a dictator had turned against him. At first it was the predictable resistance: “It is socialism,” sniffed Republican congressman Robert Luce of Massachusetts about the New Deal legislation. “Whether it is communism or not I do not know.” But by summer the criticism was reaching a crescendo. Nine million workers were employed in NRA programs, and wage codes had been signed by a million employers. Businessmen—nervous that Roosevelt's legitimizing of collective bargaining would strengthen the labor movement—denounced the omnibus NIRA as creeping socialism or business fascism. Northern sweatshop owners and Southern planters feared they would lose their cheap labor to the “dole,” as the recovery and public works projects were dubbed, and started calling Roosevelt a Communist. Herbert Hoover publicly denounced the NIRA as totalitarian.

The massive government-industry collaboration lauded as a godsend in May seemed radically anti-capitalist as panic receded and business leaders contemplated the scope of Roosevelt's program. “The excessive centralization and the dictatorial spirit are producing a revulsion of feeling against bureaucratic control of American life,” Walter Lippmann said. Erstwhile Roosevelt supporter Hearst charged that NRA stood for “Nonsensical, Ridiculous, Asinine interference.” He aggressively opposed “Stalin Delano Roosevelt's Raw Deal” and compared the president to “the Mussolinis, the Hitlers, the Lenins and all of those who seek to establish a dictatorial form of government.”

Wall Street, bridling at the new securities regulations and distressed by the burgeoning federal expenditures, began rumbling about “dictatorial powers.” Much of the negative reaction swirled around the gold standard and a deep-seated belief—“rooted in suspicion,” as historian William Manchester put it—that gold and empire were synonymous. Gold was sacred, seen as the “hallmark of Western culture.” To rabid anti-Semites, Roosevelt, as a Wall Street puppet, had taken America off the gold standard to allow the Jews to control the world's gold while the Gentiles were left with the less valuable silver.

If pundits and advisers were stunned by the swiftness with which the backlash took hold, Roosevelt saw it coming. The fissures in Congress were just beneath the surface in the special session's waning days, but Roosevelt had managed to keep them from splitting open. Critics on both sides of the aisle had begun to question the constitutionality of NIRA, prompting Roosevelt to accelerate his timetable to send Congress home. “We're going at top speed in order to adjourn early,” one Democratic senator confided to his sons. “Roosevelt wants the Congress out of the way. He is losing a little bit of his astounding and remarkable poise … There is a revolt in the air in the Congress, too. Men have followed him upstairs without question or criticism … These men have about reached the limit of their endurance. Roosevelt, clever as he is, senses that fact, and before there is an actual break, he wishes us out of the way.” FDR had rammed through his policies until his impeccable intuition told him it was time to stop. He possessed a heightened sense of timing and the practicality to stay apace with the populace, never getting too far in front at the risk of losing their confidence. He knew the necessity of appearing calm and assured, knew that projecting the image of serene leadership was as important as the policies themselves. He had successfully maneuvered the newspapermen at his twice-weekly press conferences to explain his reasoning for various ideas and to prepare the public to accept them.

Even as prices rose, purchasing power increased, homes were saved, bank deposits were restored, millions went back to work, and recovery was proceeding, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction among the country's elite took hold. Contemporaneous observers thought the griping was really about jealousy of Roosevelt's success, bitterness at having been manipulated, anxiety about the long-term results, apprehension of change, and an inherent resistance to government interference.

“Businessmen of 1929 had enjoyed privileges and were delighted to receive them in 1933,” wrote a historian of the period, “but did not like being told by Roosevelt that they must shoulder responsibilities, especially toward their workers.” A South Carolina newspaper editor had little empathy for their plight. “The ‘captains' of finance and industry have been exposed as empty-pates … The ‘captains' are bare in their nakedness as greater fools even than knaves.”

Elite extremists posing as liberty lovers and constitution defenders cropped up and became increasingly vociferous throughout the summer. “This is despotism. This is tyranny. This is the annihilation of liberty. The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot … The President … has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom,” a U.S. senator wrote in an appeal to arouse his constituents.

One target of special enmity was Roosevelt's close relationship with Sidney Hillman—a Jewish refugee from czarist Russia. The onetime rabbinical student had been a fabric cutter in what was known as New York's “needle trades” and had gone on to form a new union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, to organize the nation's most notorious sweatshops. Throughout America, women and children were being paid less than three dollars a week for a fifty-hour workweek; in New York City, the garment industry—which employed more than fifty thousand women—was sometimes paying as little as sixty cents an hour. Thousands of workers took home less than a dollar after a nine-hour day. As a Roosevelt insider, Hillman helped design the New Deal unemployment and public works policies, which were committed to transforming America's benighted working class into a modernized workforce with economic security and fair labor practices.

The dissatisfaction vented by Wall Street was not felt by ordinary Americans, who rushed to hang portraits of Roosevelt over their fireplaces and proudly displayed the famous “Blue Eagle” NRA poster. With an insignia modeled after a Native American thunderbird—and a concept derived from a wartime patch by which soldiers could recognize each other—the poster bore the legend “We Do Our Part.” In his most soothing and convincing way, Roosevelt had launched the Blue Eagle during a fireside chat: “In war, in the gloom of night attack, soldiers wear a bright badge on their shoulders to be sure that comrades do not fire on comrades. On that principle, those who cooperate in this program must know each other at a glance.” Effusive and grateful letters and telegrams poured into the White House by the truckload from poor Americans who saw their lives improving. While the Far Right and Far Left abandoned him, the “vast army of the center” was firmly in the president's camp.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt's us-against-them rhetoric and references to “comrades” inflamed the upper class, and the stirrings of anti-Rooseveltism, which had begun even before he had taken office, were escalating. Soon these sparks would ignite into full-fledged hatred, dividing the country and emboldening powerful enemies. “Through the channels of the rich—the clubs, the banks, the brokerage offices, the Park Avenue salons, the country club locker rooms, the South Carolina shoots, the Florida cabanas—there rushed a swelling flood of stories and broadsides, many unprintable, depicting Roosevelt as a liar, a thief, a madman given to great bursts of maniacal laughter, an alcoholic, a syphilitic, a Bolshevik,” according to Arthur Schlesinger's account. It was from this fertile field of loathing that the “traitor to his class” epithet was born, and the publishers of the country's most influential newspapers, themselves members of the noble class, eagerly fanned the flames.

The rapport between Roosevelt and the press was initially based on mutual benefit, in which he used them to disseminate his philosophy and float his designs and they relied on him for a steady stream of copy. But an element of wariness and suspicion existed, especially between Roosevelt and the wealthy publishers—as opposed to the working press, for whom he had respect. He thought the
Chicago Tribune
under the helm of reactionary Republican Robert McCormick “the rottenest newspaper in the whole United States.” He thought Arthur Krock, editor of the
New York Times
, “terrible” and consistently inaccurate, and he derided the
Times
newsroom as a “rarefied atmosphere of self-anointed scholars.” He reproached syndicated columnist Frank Kent for having both a “poison pen and poison tongue,” and considered Lippmann painfully out of touch with the reality of America. “I wish sometime that he could come more into contact with the little fellow all over the country and see less of the big rich brother!” He accused
Time
magazine's Henry Luce of having a “deliberate policy of either exaggeration or distortion.” And he reserved a special animus for his onetime friend and promoter of dictatorship, Hearst: “I sometimes think that Hearst has done more harm to the cause of Democracy and civilization in America than any three other contemporaries put together.” He condemned the fat-cat newspaper owners for caring more about their personal social and economic status than about fostering an independent American press. He sympathized with the working journalists whose bosses ordered them to write certain stories and ignore others. “I think they [the publishers] have been more responsible for the inciting of fear in the community than any other factors,” Roosevelt said.

The feeling of distrust and animosity was reciprocal. In addition to Hearst, Roosevelt's most vicious critics were McCormick and H. L. Mencken, who steadily portrayed the president and his advisers as “Reds.” The Roosevelt haters lapped up the visceral, often-illogical, and irrational attacks. Not since the hostility heaped on Andrew Jackson a century before had a president been so savagely pummeled by the press—their screeds betraying “a certain streak of madness in American political criticism,” as two twentieth-century scholars saw it.

“Colonel” McCormick rebuked Roosevelt for spending billions on “men who have been parasites their entire lives, have never produced anything and never intend to produce anything, who have always lived at the expense of others, and plot to live better than the others who support them.”

Likewise, the tremendously influential Mencken could not abide Roosevelt's freewheeling spending on the nation's indigent and unemployed. “The republic proceeds toward hell at a rapidly accelerating tempo,” Mencken wrote to a libertarian author when the New Deal was finalized in June 1933. “I am advocating making him a king in order that we may behead him in case he goes too far beyond the limits of the endurable. A President, it appears, cannot be beheaded, but kings have been subjected to the operation from ancient times.” While Mencken's remark was certainly in jest, such chatter by respected pundits had the power of provoking deranged individuals into action. Loose and inflammatory talk of assassination and other violent acts became eerily prevalent, and the Secret Service went into high gear as threats multiplied. “What that fellow Roosevelt needs is a thirty-eight caliber revolver right at the back of his head,” a respectable citizen said at a Washington dinner party.

While Mencken thought the New Deal laboratory just that—a wild experiment that was unplanned, untried, and unwise—Hearst and McCormick saw a more sinister hand in it, subscribing to the theory that Roosevelt was the puppet for a Communist takeover. Both took seriously their mission to stop him, for only with a gullible public and a malleable press could Roosevelt's coup be successful.

In addition to the mainstream establishment critics, there arose an extremist element with its own methods for propagating hatred, name-calling, and character assassination. One shadowy organization began spreading the canard that Roosevelt—on behalf of an international Jewish conspiracy—was protecting the Jewish killer of the “Lindbergh baby.” The toddler son of celebrity aviator and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh had been kidnapped from the nursery of his parents' upscale New Jersey home on March 1, 1932—in what became known as the “crime of the century.” Footprints, a ladder, and a chisel were left beneath the nursery's second-story window. A fifty-thousand-dollar ransom payment was made before the boy's murdered remains were found three months later. The case came to epitomize the fears plaguing America's ruling class—which Roosevelt had so legendarily betrayed—about an angry Jewish proletariat. In the convoluted, far-fetched scenario that would eventually find its way into a published pamphlet with nearly a million copies distributed, Roosevelt was a de facto collaborator with the kidnappers.

Much of the Far Right suspicion centered on the New Deal as being a Jewish conspiracy, and there developed a cottage industry for those determined to prove that Jewish blood coursed through Roosevelt's veins. William Dudley Pelley and his legion of Silver Shirts worked feverishly to prove that Roosevelt was the installed head of a Jewish dictatorship. Pelley and others intent on exposing Roosevelt's Jewish bloodlines inevitably trotted out the infamous
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
, the crackpot 1905 alleged transcripts from a secret World Zionist Conference, which were gaining popularity among American anti-Semites in 1933. “Often characterized as a blueprint for world domination by Jews,” wrote religious scholar James Carroll, “the
Protocols
is a mishmash of commentary on the press, finance, government, and history … The diabolical center of the plot, of course, was the international cabal of Jewish financiers, and world domination would be achieved by Jewish control of money.” It was published in the United States by the automobile titan Henry Ford, the inventor of the assembly line and an advocate of a “biblical capitalism” personified by German Fascism.