The Plots Against the President (6 page)

Chapter Ten

Year of Fear

“The situation is critical, Franklin,” Walter Lippmann told the president-elect in early 1933. “You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.”

The columnist was not alone in his anxiety that the revolutionary climate could spawn a demagogue. Many had a deep premonition that American democracy as it had existed was coming to an end. For his part, Lippmann—a “reluctant convert” to Roosevelt—now believed that the state of emergency demanded measures that transcended the routine methods of government. Congress should not be allowed “to obstruct, to delay, to mutilate, and to confuse,” he wrote, recommending that it suspend debate for a year, giving Roosevelt free rein to rescue the country from its deathbed. “The danger we have to fear is not that Congress will give Franklin D. Roosevelt too much power, but that it will deny him the powers he needs. A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.”

The fears were not unfounded. In New York City, thirty-five thousand men and women crowded into Union Square to listen to Communist Party agitators. A mass march on the Columbus statehouse by the Ohio Unemployed League threatened to “take control of the government.” Five thousand teachers in Chicago stormed the city's banks. Dozens of American cities and towns were broke, their streets filling with garbage and protesters, their coffers empty of funds for sanitation or law enforcement. Anton Cermak, mayor of Chicago, where six hundred thousand men were out of work, told the Illinois State Legislature: “Call out the troops before you close the relief stations.” Leading citizens of Dayton, Ohio, organized a committee to plan the city's survival if the power lines were cut and the railroads stopped running. Governors and mayors throughout the land worried about the spark that might ignite mob violence among the have-nots, while the haves became increasingly nervous and began to arm themselves. The wealthy—and even the simply comfortable—began stockpiling guns, ammunition, and canned goods and hoarding their money in case of a nationwide revolt. Farmers in Iowa, armed with clubs and pitchforks, were engaged in an “organized refusal” to market products for which they were being underpaid. Iowa dairy farmers went on strike, refusing to deliver milk to national distributors.

The War Department concentrated its armed units near the country's larger cities in case of a takeover by the “Reds,” as the Communists were called. The very “glue that holds societies together”—to use Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's description of institutions and authority—was disintegrating. “Capitalism is on trial,” the dean of the Harvard Business School pronounced, in what would have been a remarkably radical statement at any other time in American history. “And on the issue of this trial may depend the whole future of Western civilization.”

“The farmers will rise up. So will labor,” a Los Angeles banker predicted. “The Reds will run the country—or maybe the Fascists. Unless, of course, Roosevelt does something.” Leaders of both major parties watched helplessly as the situation worsened, prompting Democrats and Republicans alike to call for Hoover to step down and let Roosevelt assume command.

“They weren't paranoid,” William Manchester wrote years later of the vociferous alarmists who had cropped up. “The evidence strongly suggests that had Roosevelt in fact been another Hoover, the United States would have followed seven Latin American countries whose governments had been overthrown by Depression victims.”

On January 30, 1933, Roosevelt's fifty-first birthday, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. “I want,” Hitler said upon his ascendance, “precisely the same power as Mussolini exercised after the March on Rome.” The sudden explosion of the Nazi revolution frightened the other European nations, which heard horror stories of gangs of young Nazis terrorizing Jewish-owned businesses, beating the merchants and raiding the stores. With alarming swiftness, Hitler added sixty thousand storm troopers to the hundred-thousand-man German army, suspended civil liberties, and removed non-Nazis from official posts.

In contrast to Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who had been in power since 1922 and who was considered the most prestigious political figure in the world, Hitler seemed a belligerent and unpredictable leader. Indeed, many thought a Mussolini-like leader a perfect counterweight to a dangerous radical like Hitler. “I do not often envy other countries their governments, but I saw that if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now,” proclaimed one of President Hoover's closest Republican allies in the U.S. Senate. Mussolini had revived the Italian economy, and his Black Shirts—the military arm of his organization, made up of two hundred thousand disgruntled soldiers, and analogous to America's Bonus Army—were highly regarded. Even the term
Fascism
implied a strength and unity desperately needed in America: “The word itself derived from the Latin for a bundle of sticks bound together and thus unbreakable.”

Indeed, Italy in the time of Mussolini, who had legendarily made the trains run on time, seemed a viable model for what America could and should become, and talk of dictatorship was rampant during the interregnum of despair. The nation's scholarly and trade journals analyzed the political atmosphere, some predicting revolution and others espousing new forms of government. There was no consensus of opinion, as authors, politicians, journalists, academics, and laymen explored the gamut, from Communism to Fascism to Socialism. If any uniformity existed, it was the conclusion that capitalism was dead in its present iteration. Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, and an arbiter of the academic establishment, encouraged college students to embrace totalitarianism, which produced “men of far greater intelligence, far stronger character and far more courage than the system of elections.”

Renowned writers such as John Dos Passos, Erskine Caldwell, Malcolm Cowley, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair were champions of Communism. “Those rascals in Russia … have got mighty good ideas … Just think of everybody in a country going to work,” Will Rogers opined about Joseph Stalin's regime. It was a fertile and confusing intellectual environment. “Communist Party members were venomous to socialists, old-guard socialists were battling new-guard socialists, mutant strains of Marxists were battling one another,” wrote political journalist Myra MacPherson in her biography of I. F. Stone. “Working-class ideologues were joined by middle- and upper-class Ivy League graduates who played at being radically chic Marxists.”

While Communism was much feared in America, Fascism was not only venerated but also avant-garde. Mussolini was wildly popular among the country's intellectual elite, who believed that democracy, and its belief in the common man, had run its course. Italy's thriving economy and corporatist discipline held great sway with those seeking a solution to the fiscal, social, cultural, and political crisis facing the country. “Even the iron hand of a national dictator is in preference to a paralytic stroke,” declared Governor Alf Landon of Kansas. Al Smith, Roosevelt's mentor turned vicious critic, proposed—only somewhat facetiously—taking the Constitution and putting it “on the shelf” until the crisis had passed. “What does a democracy do in a war?” Smith asked. “It becomes a tyrant, a despot, a real monarch.”

As dictators “swaggered across Europe and Asia,” and countries reneged on their war debt, Roosevelt decided he needed to find out for himself what “people like Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini, Chiang Kai-shek, and Hirohito” were up to. He decided to send newspaperman Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., his friend and adviser, as a secret presidential envoy. Under the auspices of
Liberty
magazine, Vanderbilt would interview Hitler and Mussolini. Meeting with Roosevelt at Hyde Park before embarking on the cruise liner
Empress of Britain
, Vanderbilt got his instructions. Roosevelt “told me that what he wanted me to do in Germany was find out if the German people were really behind Hitler and, if so, why,” Vanderbilt said. “Facing the reality of Hitler's accession, he also wanted to know whether there was anything within reason we could do to make for a better relationship with Germany.”

The obsessive anti-Semitism of Hitler stunned Vanderbilt. After interviewing the führer twice, Vanderbilt became convinced that an improved relationship with Germany would be impossible. “He told me that the only thing he wanted from us was to end all trade with the Jews! He said I should be grateful for his anti-Semitic campaign, as the Jews were ‘selling out the world to the Communists.' ”

His meeting with Mussolini was underwhelming, almost banal. Il Duce's great pearl of wisdom was that “you seize power with one group and govern with another.”

Ultimately, Roosevelt and his advisers would conclude that the potential for a homegrown demagogue posed a far larger threat to their political agenda, and the country's stability, than the current martinets of foreign lands.

Chapter Eleven

American Mussolini and the Radio Priest

“Who is that
awful
man sitting on my son's right?” Roosevelt's mother, Sara, exclaimed sotto voce, directing her attention to the preposterously flamboyant governor of Louisiana. Huey Long, the “pudgy pixie” whose shock of auburn hair fell messily onto his forehead, was wearing a purple shirt and loud pink necktie—a sartorial statement intended to shock the aristocracy. The occasion, a formal luncheon at Hyde Park, was Roosevelt's overture to the man most threatening to him from the Left. Dubbed the “Incredible Kingfish” by
Time
magazine, the populist Long was widely considered a rising political star who might challenge Roosevelt in the 1936 election. Indeed, Roosevelt considered Long “one of the two most dangerous men in the United States today.” (The second, in Roosevelt's opinion, was General MacArthur.)

Pressing the liberal agenda, Long was considered symbol and icon for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, his radicalism descended from the William Jennings Bryan tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Long's “Share Our Wealth Society,” with its slogan “Every Man a King” and motto “Soak the Rich,” was in its nascent phase. But his vision for the decentralization of wealth in America was already molded. He saw himself as the spokesman for the Far Right and Far Left of both national parties—an “American Mussolini” whose passionate anti-elitist rhetoric could lead to the creation of a new third party that would elevate him to the presidency. None of this was lost on the insightful and pragmatic Roosevelt. At the luncheon, as Long badgered Roosevelt about the need for enlightened economic reform in America, the president-elect listened intently.

“Frankie, you're not going to let Huey Long tell you what to do, are you?” Sara reportedly cried out. Long appeared unfazed by Sara's rude remarks, but they had not gone unnoticed. “I like him,” Long would later say of Roosevelt in relating the peculiar encounter. “He's not a strong man, but he means well. But by God, I feel sorry for him. He's got even more sonsofbitches in his family than I got in mine.”

During the interregnum, both conservative and liberal Democrats concentrated on moving the president-elect into their court. They made their way to his homes at Hyde Park, Albany, Manhattan, or Warm Springs, Georgia—the retreat he frequented for his unending physical therapy. Roosevelt listened to them all and ravenously inhaled their ideas, suggestions, observations, theories, predictions, prophesies, revelations, and concepts. It was as if he could not get enough, devouring facts and considering solutions with the exhilaration of a curious and precocious student. “The countless visitors who trooped to see FDR between election and inauguration ranged from congressional barons to local farmers, from haughty industrialists to mendicant job-seekers,” said one account of the period. Propositions ranged from government intervention to wealth distribution to laissez-faire to job creation to trust busting to budget balancing, and from them, Roosevelt drew the framework of his New Deal policies.

Meanwhile, Huey Long and his counterpart on the Right, the rabidly anti-Communist Father Charles E. Coughlin—whom one journalist called his “twin terror”—increasingly saw Roosevelt as an equivocating, bourgeois politician rather than a man with a plan. Long began to believe that Roosevelt was placating all sides, playing them off against each other without any real conviction or strategy for ending the Great Depression or redistributing the nation's wealth. “When I talk to him, he says ‘Fine! Fine! Fine! Maybe he says ‘Fine!' to everybody,” Long complained of Roosevelt's propensity for trying to please everyone.

Though partisan opposites—Huey Long was “secretly contemptuous of the priest”—Coughlin and Long inspired protest movements that defined the nation's response to the Great Depression in the weeks and months leading up to Roosevelt's inauguration. What they had in common was a great distrust of Roosevelt—a skepticism Roosevelt felt tenfold toward both of them—and an alliance to catapult Long to the presidency. Coughlin “capitulated” to Long, according to Long biographer T. Harry Williams. “Huey was a political man and was going to work toward his goal with political methods. Coughlin was a theorist, a voice, an instrument that the political man could use but would never completely trust.”

Coughlin, called the “father of hate radio” by his biographer Donald Warren, broadcast to nearly forty million people from his Church of the Little Flower, in Royal Oak, Michigan. Denouncing Wall Street financiers as “shylocks” and “money changers,” his anti-establishment populism struck a deep chord with the millions of unemployed and destitute throughout the land. Like Long, the Roman Catholic priest had been an early supporter of Roosevelt, but even before the president-elect was inaugurated, Coughlin had become disillusioned, suspecting that he was a tool of Wall Street. Long and Coughlin—mirrored extremes of the populist movement in America—both sought to break the concentration of power in the hands of the government. Both hinted at financial conspiracies. Both used rhetoric that was “laden with appeals to the idea of the traditional, rooted community and the special virtues of the common people,” as historian Alan Brinkley described it, and that “warned constantly of the dangers posed by distant, hidden forces. It emphasized with special urgency the issue of money—of unstable or scarce currency, of tyrannical bankers, of usurious interest.”

With the swagger and showmanship of a Southern evangelical preacher, Long was one of the first American politicians to master the new medium of commercial radio in the early 1920s. Broadcasting from WCAG in New Orleans to eight thousand radio sets in the city, Long grasped the significance of a system of communication in which each radio reached an approximate five listeners as families huddled together to hear the transmissions. The audience, he realized, was exponential. One broadcast speech could be heard by as many as forty thousand people in the relatively unpopulated state of Louisiana, providing historic access to his all-white voting constituency. With vitriol and ever-mounting oratory skills, he lambasted the exploitative rich and the venal corporations. Initially, the Roosevelt forces and the mainstream print media ridiculed Long, calling him the “Messiah of the Rednecks” and “Whooey the 14th.” Roosevelt, however, saw in him an aspiring demagogue and thought it no laughing matter.

For his part, Long was brazenly disrespectful of the blue-blooded Roosevelt, calling him “Frank,” refusing to remove his hat upon entering Roosevelt's suite at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, and denigrating him as “all wool and a yard wide.” Long thought that Roosevelt's refusal to distance himself from the Wall Street power brokers signaled a personal corruption and portentous disinclination to break from his class.

Like Long in Louisiana, Father Coughlin in Michigan was at the vanguard of mass politics and also recognized the power of radio. In 1926, seeing radio as a potential fundraising vehicle for the little church he had built in a Detroit suburb, Coughlin asked a local station to broadcast his Sunday sermons. Those weekly one-hour speeches—“once pleasant discourses on the life of Christ and the lessons of the Bible,” as Brinkley described them, soon evolved into political diatribes. At first his programs were relatively benign, as he responded to the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan cross burnings on the grounds of his church and railed against birth control. But in 1930, in response to the stock market crash and the sudden unemployment in Detroit of nearly two hundred thousand people, Coughlin took a different tack, shifting away from religion and toward politics and the economy. His sermons became rabidly anti-Communist and highly incendiary, and were but a precursor for the right-wing venom to come.

By 1933, Coughlin was drawing crowds of thousands into auditoriums in Cincinnati, Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, New York, and St. Louis, his invective carried over loudspeakers to thousands more in the streets who gathered to listen. He was described as “a priest who was more famous at the microphone than at the Mass,” one “who could woo more men to a convention hall than to a communion rail, and who spent more time in politics than in parish halls …” He had four personal secretaries and more than a hundred clerks to answer the eighty thousand letters he received every week, and his annual contributions reached nearly half a million dollars. As his popularity soared—and his ego swelled—his rants grew ever more angry. What had started as an outgrowth of the European Catholic social movement, and a personal attempt to minister to the recent immigrants to Michigan from Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Poland, who were facing harsh anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic abuse, had evolved into an equally hate-filled response. He too had his eyes on the creation of a third party and supported the founding of the Christian Front—a pro-Fascist political movement designed to counteract Marxism and secularism. He was inspired by the teachings of Pope Leo XIII, who, in 1891, issued his
Rerum Novarum
warning that Socialist efforts to redistribute the wealth were pernicious to all nations as well as to the Vatican. Simply put, Coughlin sought to be the guardian of America, uniting Christians to fight the “Christless” Communism that was threatening to destroy it. “Choose to-day!” he appealed to his audience. “It is either Christ or the Red Fog of Communism.” Wrapping himself figuratively in the Stars and Stripes, he oozed patriotism from his lips as he spoke reverentially about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

In February 1933, Coughlin's focus changed yet again with a sudden tirade about the “spirit of gold trading in the heart of the international Jew.” Suggesting that Jewish control of international finance had wreaked havoc with the gold standard, Coughlin was entering a new phase of anti-Semitism, which would lace his future sermons. For the first time, his “money changer” enemies had a face: They were Jews, and Franklin Roosevelt was their puppet. In his mind, democracy was coming to an end, and America's only choice was to become either Fascist or Communist—“I take the road to Fascism,” he would declare unabashedly.

The two ideologues, Long and Coughlin, along with their bitter defections from the Roosevelt camp and the movements they germinated, revealed an American-bred anti-Semitism and an anti-European isolationism that would have enduring national and global consequences. Roosevelt watched their feverish antics closely, once writing to a colleague that “in normal times the radio and other appeals by them would not be effective. However these are not normal times; people run after strange gods.” Still, he concluded a viable partnership could never exist between the two men. “There is no question that it is all a dangerous situation but when it comes to a showdown these fellows cannot all lie in the same bed and will fight among themselves with almost absolute certainty.”