American Experiment (291 page)

May 17
—The President sent a double recommendation to Congress— “for the machinery necessary for a great cooperative movement throughout all industry” for reemployment, a shorter working week, decent wages, and the prevention of “unfair competition and disastrous overproduction”; and for granting the President “full power to start a large program of direct employment” at a cost of about $3.3 billion. The resulting National Industrial Recovery Act was a legacy of World War I mobilization and the 1920s trade association movement, and the immediate product of brainstorming and horse-trading among an unusually large number of advisers and politicians in the legislature and the executive. Offering enticements to labor as well as capital, the bill was assailed from both right and left on Capitol Hill and barely survived the Senate gantlet. “History probably will record the National Industrial Recovery Act,” said Roosevelt when he signed it on June 16, “as the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress.”

So with that signing ended the Hundred Days—a policy explosion without precedent in American history—but of what enduring effect none could foresee.

At the center of the action sat Franklin Roosevelt, presiding, instructing, wheedling, persuading, enticing, pressuring, negotiating, manipulating, conceding, horse-trading, placating, mediating—leading and following, leading and misleading. People marveled how the President, his cigarette holder deployed more jauntily than ever, appeared to bounce and skip through the day, despite his inability to walk, as he punctuated solemn conferences with jests, long and somewhat imaginary stories, and great booming laughter. While still in bed in the morning, his large torso looming over legs that hardly ribbed the sheets, he spouted ideas, questions, instructions to his aides. Wheeled over to the west wing, he swung into his office chair for long hours of visitors, letters, telephone calls, emergency sessions.

Calvin Coolidge had allegedly disposed of visitors by a simple formula: “Don’t talk back to ’em.” Roosevelt used talk as a tool of influence, outtalking his advisers, outtalking department heads, even outtalking visiting senators.

The President soon proved himself an artist in government—in his fine
sense of timing, his adroit application of pressure, his face-to-face persuasiveness, his craft in playing not only foes but friends off against one another. Like a creative artist, Frances Perkins said, he would begin his picture “without a clear idea of what he intends to paint or how it shall be laid out upon the canvas, and then, as he paints, his plan evolves out of the material he is painting.” He could think and feel his way into political situations with imagination, intuition, insight.

These traits dominated his policy thinking as well as his political calculating—and with less success. People close to Roosevelt were dismayed by his casual and disorderly intellectual habits. To Adolf Berle his judgments of people and ideas were “primarily instinctive and not rational,” his learning came not from books but from people. He read not books but newspapers, perhaps half a dozen before breakfast—devoured them “like a combine eating up grain,” a friend noted. He was not so much a creator of ideas as a broker of them. He did not assemble his ideas into a comprehensive and ordered program, with priorities and interconnections. Just as he lived each day for itself, as he liked to tell friends, so he appeared to flirt with each idea as it came along.

Everything seemed to conspire to fortify these intellectual habits of the new President—his eclectic education and reading, the ideologically divided party he led, the factionalized Congress he confronted, above all the advisers he had chosen and who had chosen him. His chief brain truster during 1933 was Ray Moley. Prickly and hard-driving, the former Columbia professor—now Assistant Secretary of State—shared some of his boss’s political shrewdness and opportunism, intuitive judgment, and keenness in evaluating friend and foe. But Roosevelt also talked at length with Berle about banking, railroad, and monetary problems, and Berle’s ideas for raising business to a higher level of efficiency and responsibility; with Tugwell about conservation, agriculture, and industrial discipline, and Tugwell’s notions of democratic planning of the economy.

These brain trusters had their differences, but they seemed three of a kind compared with Roosevelt’s other advisers, formal and informal: his old-time Hudson Valley friend and neighbor Henry Morgenthau, humanitarian by heritage and sensibility but cautiously conservative in economic policy; budget director Lewis Douglas, absolutely dedicated to governmental penny-pinching and fiscal orthodoxy; Treasury Under Secretary Dean Acheson, close to Douglas in his economics; Jesse Jones, Texas business mogul who now ran the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Another broad influence on Roosevelt was the lively correspondence and visitation with Felix Frankfurter, who discreetly spoke for Justice Brandeis’s bias against economic and governmental giantism even as the
Harvard Law School professor helped people Washington agencies with young activists who would make their own diverse marks in coming months.

Most remarkable of all was that one-woman brain trust, Eleanor Roosevelt—and all the more influential for not being viewed in that role. Through quick visits to her husband while he was still breakfasting in bed, little chits and memos, thick reports infiltrated into the executive offices, the visitors she invited to the White House, and her own influence on public opinion and Washington attitudes, she soon became a penetrating voice for the humanitarian liberal-left. Through a wide correspondence— she received 300,000 pieces of mail the first year—her press conferences and newspaper columns, her speeches and magazine articles, her widely advertised (and criticized) trips to CCC camps and coal mines, she began to build up a potentially powerful constituency of her own. Historian Mary Beard wrote admiringly of her ability to give “inspiration to the married, solace to the lovelorn, assistance to the homemaker, menus to the cook, and help to the educator, direction to the employer, caution to the warrior, and deeper awareness of its primordial force to the ‘weaker sex.’” The First Lady also served as a model for other women in Washington government. Her close friend Frances Perkins, with her labor and urban concerns and constituencies, had special access to both Roosevelts, and women like Molly Dewson of the Democratic National Committee learned that they could be, all at the same time, competent, caring, and controversial.

Such was the flux and flow of advice to the President that no one really knew which advisers were influential or why or when. Who was having the President’s ear at the moment provoked jealousies worthy of the royal courts of old. The President’s mind seemed awesomely accessible—to the kitchen cabinet, to department heads like Ickes and Perkins, to experts coming through Washington. The President would be seen talking animatedly with men regarded by the orthodox—though not necessarily by history—as quacks.

Roosevelt was following no set course, left, right, or center. He was leading by guess and by God. He not only admitted to playing by ear but boasted of it. He was a football quarterback, he told reporters, calling a new play after he saw how the last one turned out. Snap judgments had to be made. But Washington wondered what lay back of the snap judgments—some ideology or philosophy?

Neither of these, but rather a loose collection of values—Roosevelt’s warm humanitarianism, his belief that the needy must be helped, that government must step in when private institutions could not do the job, and that now—in 1933—this meant the federal government. The President
also had a fine grasp of political and governmental nuts and bolts. But between the two levels of grand philosophy and policy specifics he would be experimental, eclectic, nonprogrammatic, nondoctrinaire. He would be a broker of ideas as well as of interests and individuals.

As a master broker Roosevelt presided over a grand concert of interests. Labor, farmers, businessmen, investors, unemployed youth, some of the poor—all got a slice of the first New Deal, at least on paper. FDR assumed the role of bipartisan leader, “president of all the people,” virtually the national father. He happily cited a Nebraska congressman’s definition of the New Deal as an effort “to cement our society, rich and poor, manual worker and brain worker, into a voluntary brotherhood of freemen, standing together, striving together, for the common good of all.” Government, he told a convention of bankers, was “essentially the outward expression of the unity and the leadership of all groups.” All this seemed a long cry from the “discipline and direction under leadership” he had promised in his inaugural address.

Congress, though more responsive to regional and special interests, quickened to the energy that radiated from the President. Even some Republicans fell over themselves to express support for the Democratic Roosevelt. In many respects the Chief Executive was Chief Legislator. Congress was by no means supine. Conservative Democratic senators like Carter Glass and Harry F. Byrd of Virginia usually opposed the President’s bills. Congress as a whole, however, was more positive than even Roosevelt toward the New Deal. Many congressmen wanted more inflation than Roosevelt, ampler spending for people’s needs, greater generosity to veterans and farmers, bigger public works, tougher policies toward Wall Street. The President skillfully brokered with the congressional left. For the conservative Democrats in the Senate he had growing hostility. Byrd opposed the AAA, FDR told Tugwell, because, as an apple grower, “he’s afraid you’ll force him to pay more than ten cents an hour for his apple pickers.”

As master broker Roosevelt for a time could stay above the political and ideological battles raging around him. In the distribution of good things— whether government money or patronage jobs or social policy or his smile of approval—he could act as transactional leader within the existing system. He might give TVA to the left and economy to the right, but as a compromising broker rather than ideological leader he would not move decisively left or right. Social justice, he said, “ought not to consist of robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

It all seemed to work beautifully for a time. Employment, prices, income all soared in the weeks after the Hundred Days. The industrial production
index nearly doubled from March to July. Unemployment fell off from around 15 million at the time of Roosevelt’s inaugural to about 11 million in October, a drop in the jobless rate from about 30 to about 22 percent.

Roosevelt’s popularity floated high on this first gust of recovery. “If he burned down the capitol,” said Will Rogers, “we would cheer and say, ‘well, we at least got a fire started anyhow.’”

He won praise from Bertie McCormick’s Republican Chicago
Tribune
and William Randolph Hearst’s New York
American.
Daily, White House mailmen hauled in sacks of mail, most of it laudatory, some of it fulsome. An adviser found the President happily leafing through a sheaf of this mail. He was sorting letters he had received from British subjects addressing him as “Your Majesty” or “Lord Roosevelt” or in other monarchical terms. Why? He wanted to send them to King George V for his “amusement.” History has not recorded that His Majesty was amused.

Psychology overwhelmed economics. In sad reality at least 10 million Americans remained jobless in 1933, and industrial production was still far below that of the prosperity years and even the first year of the depression. In October 3 million families—at least 12 million people—still depended on unemployment relief of about $23 a month, which covered food but left little or nothing for rent and utilities. But people
felt
better—and this was largely Roosevelt’s doing. He exuded cheerfulness. He raised hopes and expectations. Above all, he
acted;
for several months he simply dominated the front pages of the nation’s newspapers with his speeches, bill-signings, trips, executive orders, pronunciamentos.

His fireside chats carried his buoyant presence directly into home and hearth. “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking,” he said at the start of his first fireside chat in mid-March. “I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.” And he proceeded to do just that, in simple, human terms. Read later in cold print, the chats seemed a bit limp and pedestrian. Read by Roosevelt over the radio, they sounded warm, intimate, homely. Watching him deliver a fireside chat, Frances Perkins sensed that he could actually see the families listening at the other end. “His face would smile and light up as though he were actually sitting on the front porch or in the parlor with them.” The President took care not to overuse this device, giving only four chats the first year, at two- or three-month intervals.

Nor did he overstrain the press conference as a way of reaching people. He held these twice a week, to the joy of the White House press corps, but the sessions were often more frustrating than rewarding to the reporters. Roosevelt was a master at withholding information. He spent much of
the half hour jovially fencing and parrying with the reporters, or offering them tidbits, or lecturing them. Crowding around the President’s gadget-covered desk, the correspondents pressed him hard, with mixed results. Roosevelt wanted to control the flow of information, to create his own sensations, to set his own timing. He was not the first or the last President to do all this; he was simply more effective than most.

Nothing epitomized the New Deal in action better than the National Recovery Act and Administration—epitomized Roosevelt’s Concert of Interests, his role of broker, the psychological impact of the Hundred Days, the fundamental problems of the “broker state” at work. As boss of NRA, Roosevelt chose General Hugh Johnson, who was a mass of contradictions himself—outwardly a tough old cavalryman with a leathery face, squint eyes, and a rough bark of a voice, inwardly an amalgam of public commitment, touchy ego, maudlin sentimentality, business savvy, and as clamorous and picturesque as a sideshow barker. The general’s first job was to persuade employers to draw up codes of fair competition, a task he attacked like a cavalry charge. Once approved by the President and given the force of law, the codes were designed to discourage wasteful, junglelike competition by setting more orderly pricing and marketing policies, and to benefit workers by establishing higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, and the end of child labor. As part of the deal, antitrust policies would be softened so that businessmen could cooperate in setting up the codes. Code signers could affix the “Blue Eagle” label to products and shopwindows.