American Experiment (298 page)

The power of leadership at this point was being demonstrated by a most unlikely man and a most unlikely group of dispossessed—the elderly poor and insecure. Dr. Francis Townsend hardly looked the part of the charismatic leader—he was old and ailing and plain and bespectacled, resembling a bit the farmer in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic”; he had a monotonous speaking voice, he had little money left over from his medical practice, and now he was jobless. The people he mobilized appeared to be about the least combustible in the nation: elderly, largely nonpolitical, living on farms or in small towns or cities, heavily Protestant, retired on
small incomes if any. Hardly materials for a political explosion, certainly, and yet Townsend and his elderly followers became a political phenomenon during Roosevelt’s first term. The Townsend cause enrolled at least two million people in some seven thousand clubs across the nation. Reporters groped to understand the movement, but they had only to look at its causes.

Dr. Townsend was addressing a dire need—not only the financial poverty of so many of the elderly but their social and psychological predicament. Part of the human price of industrialization and urbanization, many of these men and women had lost their homes and their savings, or barely held on to them; they had left their children back on the old farm, or lost their jobs through a swift-changing technology. They had become isolated, in Talcott Parsons’s view, from “kinship, occupational, and community ties” and hence were ripe for political agitation. They needed help, and Dr. Townsend had a plan, a most wonderful plan: give everyone over sixty federal pensions of $200 a month, with the delectable requirement that the money be spent within the month and thereby bolster the whole economy. A federal sales tax would pay for the scheme. It seemed like the economic equivalent of perpetual motion.

Then there was the doctor himself, who proved to be a master of hype. He liked to tell how he had looked out of his bathroom window one day in Long Beach, California, to see three haggard old women rummaging through garbage cans, how he had burst out into a string of epithets that he wanted God Himself to hear, how he said he would shout “until the whole country hears,” and invented the movement on the spot. In fact, it was no sudden revelation. Townsend himself had come to the end of a long road—born in a log cabin in northern Illinois, he had led something of a Horatio Alger life without the Algerian reward. After picking up jobs as ranch hand, farm laborer, mine-mucker, and teacher in the West, he worked his way through medical college and then endured a hard life as a country doctor in South Dakota. Later, as a medical officer treating the Long Beach indigent during the depression, he had ample reason and time to ponder the plight of the elderly and to concoct his plan.

Not especially religious himself, Townsend invested his venture with a powerful evangelical appeal. He proclaimed that his movement would have as mighty an impact as Christianity. At their club meetings Townsendites sang hymns (including a “new” one, “Onward, Townsend soldiers / Marching as to war”), idolized the doctor as a Christ-like, God-given leader, and discussed how best to budget and spend the anticipated $200. Townsend and his top organizers installed ministers as key regional and state directors. Yet he kept the movement centralized, and he adroitly
made it seem safe and respectable, as well as transformative, by such devices as labeling his proposed sales tax a “transaction tax.”

By January 1935 the Townsend movement towered on the political horizon. The Townsend leadership was not above inflating the number of its clubs and members, and a credulous press often exaggerated the Townsendites’ strength;
Time
overstated the number of clubs by at least fivefold. Stanley High, a minister and friend of the Administration, wrote in to the White House that the more he saw of the movement, the more its power impressed him. “It is doing for a certain class of people what—a few years ago—was done by the prohibition movement: giving them a sublimation outlet.” And had not the drys actually altered the Constitution of the United States?

In what had long ago been part of the “old Northwest”—Wisconsin, Minnesota, and neighboring areas—other storm clouds were rising, where the hopes and expectations of progressives in all their colorations, independent, liberal, radical, socialistic, had glowed anew with the coming of the New Deal. In Wisconsin, “Fighting Bob” La Follette’s dissimilar sons—the cool, thoughtful “young Senator Bob” and the often tempestuous and passionate “Governor Phil”—were united in carrying on their father’s radical mission. They had also carried on the progressive tradition of political independence when, in 1934, they trounced both major parties at the Wisconsin polls. Roosevelt at a press conference had opportunistically expressed a preference for Bob La Follette over possible Democratic candidates for senator. What now would be the relationship between the rejuvenated Progressive party of Wisconsin and the New Deal? There was talk of party realignment—but of which party, in what direction? Much would turn on the future direction of FDR’s currently faltering New Deal.

The La Follettes worked closely with Minnesota governor Floyd Olson, an even more radical leader. While Phil talked vaguely of a cooperative, nonsocialistic society, Olson on the hustings denounced liberalism, fascism, capitalism, communism with equal gusto. What was he
for?
As governor he had called for public power, insurance for the jobless, a state income tax, and of course mortgage relief. For the nation he preached the gospel of “collective ownership of the means of production and distribution,” though he was no Marxist. If his proposals were somewhat fuzzy, the political power he wielded as head of his militant, well-organized Farmer-Labor party was clear and commanding. Olson too talked about a third party for 1936, headed perhaps by Bob La Follette. What about 1940? he was asked. Said Olson: “Maybe by then I won’t be radical enough.”

It was from the Far West, however, and especially California, that Roosevelt and the nation learned how tumultuous, arousing, colorful, and nutty
the politics of protest could be. No one could remember a political leader like Upton Sinclair, winner of the Golden State’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1934. A talkative, ebullient man then in his mid-fifties, Upton Sinclair had never stopped writing, protesting, and politicking since the kindling days of
The Jungle
and
The Brass Check,
his famous muckraking works. Indignant over the idle land, factories, and people he saw all about him in the early thirties, he concocted a plan that, he proclaimed categorically, would end poverty in California. And it was called just that: End Poverty in California. Under his plan the state would acquire farmland and factories, turn them over to the jobless to grow food and make their own clothes and furniture and shoes, and issue scrip that could be used for the exchange of produce and goods. Always the Utopian, Sinclair dreamed of the establishment ultimately of networks of workers’ and farmers’ villages. It would be the Cooperative Commonwealth.

The killing of Upton Sinclair’s dream was testament to the novelist’s long avowal of unpopular causes, the ingenuity of California’s power elites, and the Machiavellianism of Franklin Roosevelt.

Like other communitarian plans that had been advanced in America for over a century, EPIC was no real threat to corporate property or profit; nevertheless, the business interests of California—backed up by Republican party leaders, Hollywood moguls and movie stars, and a new type of hatchet job by professional public relations experts—portrayed the one-time muckraker as an atheistic, anarchist communist and a believer in free love, telepathy, and vegetarianism to boot. Fake photographs and newsreels showed California being invaded by bums and tramps seeking an end to their own poverty at the expense of the state’s taxpayers. All this worked in the mercurial, personality-dominated political environment of the Golden State.

Sinclair had fairly beaten the old Wilsonian politico George Creel in the Democratic primary, but the usual White House endorsement of a Democratic candidate was not forthcoming. He appealed to Roosevelt and had no answer. He appealed to Eleanor Roosevelt, who ordinarily supported the EPIC type of local initiative. Instructed by her husband to “(1) Say nothing and (2) Do nothing,” she wrote Sinclair a guarded reply. But FDR was not content to do nothing. He allowed Administration operatives to make a deal with the conservative Republican candidate, Frank Merriam, under which Merriam would proclaim, if he won, that his victory could not have happened without Democratic support and hence was no repudiation of the New Deal. And that was how the Democratic candidate was ditched, to the benefit of a Republican candidate who had come out for “Roosevelt’s policies,” the Townsend plan, and funny-money schemes.

Upton Sinclair the writer had the last word. Having authored
I
,
Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty
before his campaign, he now produced
I
,
Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked,
in which he told all. Soon he would be writing his Lanny Budd novels, which apotheosize FDR, the man who had deserted him.

In the half-century since the fateful year of 1935, historians of the New Deal have puzzled over Roosevelt’s alleged “turn to the left.” Did he indeed turn to the left—and what was the “left” to which he turned? Was it from the centrist, bipartisan essence of the “First” New Deal to the radical, populist thrust of the “Second”? Was it from government as regulator and atomizer of concentrated economic power to government as planner and coordinator of it? Was it from government as broker and unifier of major interests to government as a vehicle for more social justice and equality? Was the “Second” New Deal, in short, fundamentally more radical than the “First”? And if it was, why did FDR shift, and at the time that he did—the summer of 1935? Was it a result mainly of external forces, political and economic, working on him, or of intellectual and psychological influences working within him, or of some baffling combination of the two?

Surely a shift to the left seemed logical politically. The Democratic gains in the 1934 midterm elections had confirmed the popularity of FDR and his program. The 1934 ferment in farm and factory, the increasingly strident and persuasive voices of Long, Coughlin, and the others, the pressures from New Deal Democrats and liberal Republicans in Congress—all these appeared to set the stage for a White House call for action as the new year opened and a new Congress got underway. But that was not how the President behaved. He was obviously cool to a measure that would have seemed ideal for both policy and political reasons—New York Senator Robert Wagner’s bill to guarantee labor’s right to organize. His January State of the Union message, moderate in tone and policy recommendation, was hardly a foretaste of the stormy days to come, calling as it did for a “genuine period of good feeling, sustained by a sense of purposeful progress.”

One piece in the puzzle is clear. The President’s dismay over the defeat of the World Court and his intellectual uncertainty did not quickly pass, in contrast to earlier periods when he had been briefly down in the dumps. Activists who saw the President during the spring of 1935 remarked on his passivity and touchiness, almost as though he were suffering from a physical ailment. “I must say that the President seemed to me to be distinctly
dispirited,” Ickes noted in his diary late in February. “… He looked tired and he seemed to lack fighting vigor or the buoyancy that has always characterized him.” Ickes doubted that he could put through even his moderate program.

Was Roosevelt at last stopped, immobilized? Instead of preparing to make a mighty strategic choice between programs, between left and center, between ideologies and strategies, at this point he was picking his way, step by step, amid great pressures, moving a bit right or left as he faced specific problems. This was Roosevelt the fox, not the lion. Balancing and brokering from day to day, he was both capable of dealing with events and vulnerable to them. And then, in the spring of 1935, there occurred a series of acts that altered the political climate. These were actions, not of Roosevelt himself or his friends, but of his adversaries.

At the end of April the United States Chamber of Commerce held its annual conference in Washington. Gone and apparently forgotten were the days when the Chamber, speaking for a cowering business community, had endorsed much of the New Deal and even given the President a rising ovation. Now the nation’s business leaders—especially small businessmen who felt distanced from Washington—were ready to counterattack the New Deal. A delegate accused the Administration of trying to “Sovietize the country.” The Chamber voted its opposition to much of the New Deal already in place. Thomas J. Watson privately apologized to the President for such unrestrained criticism, and Winthrop Aldrich of the Chase National Bank, Walter Gifford of American Telephone and Telegraph, Myron Taylor of U.S. Steel, and a few other “industrial statesmen” who were now less anti-New Deal than most smaller entrepreneurs paid a placatory visit to the White House, but the President had heard the message from the wards and precincts of conservatism.

Most of FDR’s business foes could only protest, but there were other conservatives—conservatives with teeth. These were five men who made up a majority on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. Aside from one Wilson appointment, they were the legatees of Republican Presidents who had chosen safe and dependable men from the world where business, the bar, and politics converged. The minority of four were also legatees of one Democratic and several Republican Presidents—Chief Justice Hughes, appointed by Hoover; Brandeis (Wilson); Harlan F. Stone (Coolidge); and Benjamin N. Cardozo (Hoover).

No President can be sure that his judicial appointees fully share his political philosophy or will continue to share it. There was no compact old guard majority on the Court arrayed against a solid minority expressing the views of Wilsonian democracy and liberal Republicanism. Majorities
and minorities recombined fluidly as individual cases were heard. But the ideology of the 1920s—indeed, of the nineteenth century—hung closely enough over the Court as to produce a virtual massacre of New Deal measures between January 1935 and the spring of 1936. Stricken down successively were the “hot oil” provisions of the NRA Act, the Railroad Pension Act, the NRA itself, the farm mortgage law, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Guffey Bituminous Coal Act, and the Municipal Bankruptcy Act.