The Plots Against the President (5 page)

Chapter Eight

Brain Trust

One of Roosevelt's greatest gifts was the ability to recognize his own deficiencies and embrace the complementary genius in others. He harbored no delusions about his grasp of classical economics and knew that what he'd learned in a smattering of Harvard classes thirty years earlier was immaterial to the crisis at hand. Even before he had received the Democratic nomination, he had gathered a group of scholars and theorists—what he first called “my Privy Council”—to advise him on the entire range of issues confronting the nation. The economic emergency had reached such a magnitude that the stability of the country was at stake.

It was Samuel I. Rosenman, Roosevelt's chief counsel and speechwriter, who was credited with first suggesting that Roosevelt bring together a team of experts, to become the architects of his New Deal. Rosenman insisted that they “steer clear” of businessmen and politicians, who, after all, had coxswained the country into its present morass. Recommending that they seek some of the best academic minds in New York, he compiled a list of recruits from the departments of political science, law, and economics at prestigious Columbia University. Despite Rosenman's assertion that he “was the originator of this happy idea,” as the prickly Raymond Moley put it, Moley claimed that
he
had first had the notion months earlier. But in fact, Roosevelt had been working closely with a small group of intellectuals—Moley, Tugwell, Frankfurter, and Berle—long before the group of advisers was formalized. While the provenance of the concept is disputed, it was Louis Howe who first used the phrase “Brains Trust,” which he had seen in a dime store detective novel, and it was James Kieran of the
New York Times
who first published the term, which was later shortened to “Brain Trust.”

By the time Roosevelt had been elected president, the group was solidified. Moley was a political scientist, Tugwell an agricultural economist, and Berle a specialist on public finance and credit. Basil “Doc” O'Connor, Roosevelt's law partner, was a legal expert with a singular knowledge of corporate structures. These young men, with often contradictory ideas—and called “notoriously impractical” by historian Elliot Rosen—shared a vision of economic recovery and industrial restructuring based on innovations that had never been tried before.

Other, nonacademic, creative thinkers were admitted into the circle. Brigadier General Hugh S. Johnson—on loan to Roosevelt from financier and supporter Bernard Baruch—brought extensive War Department experience, as well as a passion for fiscal stability and an aptitude for budget balancing. Honorary members included James F. Byrnes of South Carolina and Key Pittman of Nevada, who, as veteran Democratic senators, would be able to skillfully maneuver the Roosevelt program through Congress and keep other party leaders in line. Charles Taussig, a molasses tycoon, was another honorary member, though considered “an amusing hanger-on” by the others. James A. Farley, another adviser, was a political kingmaker who, as head of the Democratic Party in New York, had helped orchestrate Roosevelt's rise to the presidency.

While Roosevelt was magnanimous with them all, and each had his ear, rivalries and conflicts predictably erupted. Howe, who generally distrusted academics and “considered all policy an adjunct to electioneering,” despised “Sammy the Rose” Rosenman, the Texas-born Jew who, Howe thought, monopolized Roosevelt's attention. O'Connor—“a shrewd salty Irishman” who had represented some of the most notorious of the utility holding companies—was seen as too sharp and pragmatic by the idealists. Tugwell, with his movie-star good looks and clear brilliance to match his blue eyes, was thought dangerously liberal by the realists, even if they couldn't help admiring his mind. “Rex was like a cocktail,” Moley observed. “His conversation picked you up and made your brain race along.” Though more intellectually pedestrian than the others, the stout, black-eyed, chain-smoking, ideology-averse Moley was the de facto leader of the group. Covetous and insecure, he relished his role as the cynical, unofficial quasher of his colleagues' pie-in-the-sky ideas. “I have not the slightest urge to be a reformer,” Moley would say. “Social workers make me very weary … I am essentially a conservative fellow. I tilt at no windmills.” The supercilious and aggressive Berle—a onetime prodigy who, at thirty-seven, remained the eternal man-child, according to those around him—managed to annoy or offend all the “president's men,” even as he impressed them with his credentials. Berle had entered Harvard at fourteen, graduated with highest honors at eighteen, and in 1916, at the age of twenty-one, received his law degree from Harvard. He was soon attracting national attention for his research and writing on the modern corporation.

In his good-natured and amiable way, Roosevelt delighted in having thrown together such a disparate lot; he found that their varied passions and opinions fertilized his own mind. An inveterate optimist, his Pollyannaish outlook made him seem like “a grown-up Boy Scout” who believed that a happy ending could be found for every story, a solution for every crisis. Roosevelt's sanguinity annoyed his more hard-boiled advisers, but none doubted its genuineness. “He was a progressive vessel yet to be filled with content,” Tugwell said of Roosevelt during those last days of 1932. Though his own philosophy and ideology may have seemed not yet formed, as many around him feared, and his intellectual processes too glib and shallow for the office he was about to assume, Roosevelt was, in fact, a far more intuitive and penetrating thinker than early appearances suggested.

Howe, Roosevelt's alter ego, who for two decades had been accustomed to having the candidate all to himself, now bristled at the encroaching influence of his upstart rivals—“men who rushed forward, all undeserving, to pluck fruits of triumph from a tree he himself had planted.” The consummate insider now an outsider, Howe found an ally in Eleanor, who likewise felt shunned by her husband's new circle of intimates. Each knew that the other was Roosevelt's loyal ally and protector. So it was with a heavy dose of patience and restraint that the two took a backseat to the Brain Trust boys. Howe and Eleanor watched from the sidelines as Moley, Berle, Tugwell, and the others vied for Roosevelt's attention, for the president-elect to shine his favor on their individual policy proposals. The “new political landscape,” according to one account of the tense situation, was “marked by intrigue and jealousy, stealth and duplicity.”

The power plays occurred behind closed doors and not for public scrutiny. As far as the American populace was concerned, Roosevelt remained an unknown quantity—an opportunistic politician whose rhetoric and bearing inspired confidence. His ability to lead would remain a mystery until he assumed office four months later. The country continued its economic decline while he awaited his inauguration, scheduled for March 4, 1933—the date decreed by the U.S. Constitution. The 117-day interval between his election and inauguration was the most desperate stretch of the Depression, with two of every four heads-of-household out of work. All that Americans had left was hope: hope that the new president would be able to navigate the nation out of its darkness. The renowned Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White poignantly expressed such raw faith and expectation in Roosevelt's capacity to turn his weaknesses into strengths, his shortcomings into triumphs. “Your distant cousin is an X in the equation,” White wrote to Theodore Roosevelt Jr. “He may develop his stubbornness into courage, his amiability into wisdom, his sense of superiority into statesmanship. Responsibility is a winepress that brings forth strange juices out of men.”

Chapter Nine

Winter of Our Discontent

“I wish for you a most successful administration,” outgoing President Hoover wrote to Roosevelt the morning after the election. “In the common purpose of all of us I shall dedicate myself to every possible helpful effort.” Whether Hoover's expressed sentiment was genuine or de rigueur, the two men feigned cooperation for a few weeks during the bleak winter of 1932. Given Hoover's ingrained belief that Roosevelt's election signaled the downfall of America, his congratulatory note was seen by Roosevelt's forces as disingenuous at best, calculating at worst, although Hoover allies vouched for his sincerity. Roosevelt's response to Hoover—revised and reworked numerous times with an eye toward ambiguity and legacy—indicated the delicate position in which the president-elect found himself. “On the subjects to which you refer, as in all matters relating to the welfare of the country, I am glad to cooperate in every appropriate way, subject, of course, to the requirements of my present duties as Governor.”

Then, within a week of Roosevelt's election, Hoover sent a long telegram to the governor's mansion in Albany imploring—actually challenging—Roosevelt to embrace Hoover's economic recovery program for the good of the country. The unprecedented overture by a defeated president to his rival “rang alarm bells” in Roosevelt's instinctive mind. Hoover would forever claim that he was courteously and graciously including Roosevelt in the continuum of government. But Roosevelt saw the gesture as a cunning attempt, masked in altruism, to ensnare him in Hoover's failed policies, which, in Roosevelt's mind, went to the very heart of their political differences on economic relations. Hoover had consistently blamed the financial crisis on European developments and foreign instability, which Roosevelt had roundly mocked as utter nonsense during the campaign, calling it “the boldest alibi in history.” In contrast, Roosevelt placed full responsibility on the American system. “The bubble burst first in the land of its origin—the United States,” he contended. Roosevelt saw the domestic economic condition as the single gravest issue confronting the nation and saw the thrust of the recovery as putting America back to work—not to focus on events in foreign countries.

The core of Hoover's entreaties centered on the question of war debts—“the tar-baby of American politics,” as historian David M. Kennedy described the money that the United States had loaned to Great Britain, France, and Italy during World War I. “To touch it was to glue oneself to a messy, intractable problem that had defied the genius of statesmen for a decade,” Kennedy wrote. These notes were coming due, and Europe, never having fully recovered from the war, had fallen into a deep economic depression. The Allies were in varying stages of default on their loans, and Great Britain was threatening to suspend payment of its ninety-five-million-dollar installment, due December 15, 1932. While Congress and most Americans predictably favored holding the Europeans liable for their financial obligations, many intellectuals, financiers, and economists advocated forgiving the war debts in order to stimulate the international economy. Integrally tied to the debt issue was the question of whether every nation should return to the gold standard—in simplistic terms, a method requiring each monetary unit throughout the world to be backed by a fixed quantity of gold bullion, thereby stabilizing international currency exchange rates. Indeed, the system had worked for the last half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, but Great Britain had abandoned it in 1914 to finance World War I with treasury notes, which then forced several other countries off the standard.

Hoover strongly opposed cancellation of the debts and was so emotionally attached to gold that he once described it as a sacred substance “enshrined in human instincts for over 10,000 years.” For his part, Roosevelt had not yet formulated a policy on the war debt issue. As for the gold standard, Roosevelt repeatedly joked that he didn't even know what it was—a remark that unhinged the humorless Hoover, whose biggest fear was that Roosevelt would abandon the gold standard and thereby destroy America.

If Hoover's gambit “had all the appearance of a magnificent gesture of statesmanship,” as David M. Kennedy said in his magisterial
Freedom from Fear
, it “also contained sinister political implications.” Ultimately, Roosevelt came to see Hoover's overture as a presumptuous power play and an effort to deflect blame away from himself, who, as president for four years and secretary of commerce for eight years before that, bore personal responsibility for the current disaster.

In any event, the pressure from Hoover had the unintended effect of prodding Roosevelt into deep analysis of the domestic and foreign policy issues that had only received perfunctory examination during the campaign. Ironically, Hoover's not-so-subtle scheming sparked Roosevelt's musings on what would become the New Deal. On December 22, 1932, Roosevelt diplomatically dismissed Hoover's advances—though not without implying that he did not appreciate the lame-duck president's “attempt to mousetrap him into agreement with the policies of a discredited and defeated administration”—and began in earnest his preparations for governing.

Cloistered with his advisers, Roosevelt began designing his program for recovery. “By March 4 next we may have anything on our hands from recovery to revolution,” Adolph Berle told him. “The chance is about even either way. My impression is that the country wants and would gladly support a rather daring program.” Even the habitually confident Eleanor wondered whether anyone could “do anything to save America now.”

As the nation slipped deeper into distress, Roosevelt was powerless to act until he was sworn in on March 4, 1933. The Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution had been ratified two months earlier, moving the presidential inauguration from March to January 20 of the year following the election. But since that amendment would not take effect until 1937, the old rules currently applied.

Some observers—contemporaneous journalists and later historians—found it cruel and calculating for Roosevelt to sit on the sidelines as the economy sank and the misery widened. Roosevelt “used Hoover as a foil,” wrote author Jonathan Alter, seeing the situation in the most Machiavellian terms. “He let the outgoing president hang himself—and the American economy—so that he could enter stage left as a hero … He understood that the lower Hoover and the country slid, the better he would look upon assuming office.” Even Moley, one of his closest advisers, ultimately took a similarly cynical view, later commenting that Roosevelt “either did not realize how serious the situation was or … preferred to have conditions deteriorate and gain for himself the entire credit for the rescue operation.”

But most of Roosevelt's supporters thought his position unavoidable. Aside from that during the run-up to the Civil War, it was the most dangerous interregnum in the history of America. Roosevelt was convinced that Hoover was setting a trap for him—a suspicion confirmed when he learned that a Hoover cabinet member had said of Roosevelt, “We now have the fellow in a hole that he is not going to be able to get out of.” It seemed that Hoover, like Al Smith before, had grossly underestimated his adversary. As it was, Roosevelt decided to keep his own counsel and wait until he could grab the helm of a country rocking dangerously on turbulent seas.

In the short span of 150 years—from the American Revolution through the Civil War to the twentieth century—the democracy envisioned by the founding fathers was an evolving work-in-progress. As in the “Jeffersonian Era” and the “Age of Jackson,” the stakes were astronomical, the threats were both internal and external, and the perils were potentially fatal. The nation's financial order had collapsed. Powerless, Roosevelt was relegated to the dugout while Hoover presided over the nation's wallowing. Roosevelt could do nothing but watch as unemployment rose to seventeen million and thousands of banks and businesses failed. And that was just on the home front.

The global economy was disintegrating. Events in Europe and Asia signaled the inevitability of another world war. In India, Mahatma Gandhi was at the peak of his civil disobedience against the British occupation. Blood was flowing in the streets of Havana, where a dictator had suspended the Cuban constitution. People throughout the world, it seemed, were in varying states of unrest.

The impulse that had swept America to overwhelmingly elect Franklin Roosevelt, the upheaval that was shuffling the world order, and the global reassessment of philosophies and ideologies were all colliding as 1933 began. The year was a gateway to the modern half of the twentieth century, a turning point in America's direction—in the powers of the presidency, in the relationship between the government and the people, and in the expansion of a new mass media.

It was a decisive moment in American history, one when the country, born fifteen decades earlier out of hope and idealism might have toppled.