American Experiment (301 page)

But Roosevelt would hold the spotlight. “There’s one issue in this campaign,” he told Moley in one of their last meetings, according to the former brain truster. “It’s myself, and people must be either for me or against me.”

In June the Republicans, torn between their heart and their head— between their feeling for their old stalwart, Herbert Hoover, and their practical need for a new face—chose Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas to head their ticket and Colonel Frank Knox, publisher of the Chicago
Daily News,
as his running mate. Both men were proud old Bull Moosers. Hoover, who had been castigating the New Deal in speeches around the country for years, hoped forlornly that one big speech at the convention might win him the nomination. A smashing speech it was, but the GOP rank and file knew that a ticket headed by Hoover would buy a journey to defeat. In Landon they found a decent, moderate man, with just the qualities of common sense, homely competence, and rocklike “soundness” that the party hoped to contrast with the nutty theorist in the White House, and yet with a progressive past and reputation. His square, guileless face, rimless glasses, and slightly graying hair made the Kansas governor look like a million other middle-aged, middle-class Americans.

The Democratic convention later in June was a one-man show—even though the man was not present until the end. FDR supervised the writing of an exuberantly New Deal platform, planned the schedule, and hand-picked the members of crucial delegations, such as California’s. He also forced through the convention a vital change—substitution of a simple majority for the Democracy’s historic two-thirds requirement for presidential nominations, a rule that had tied up countless conclaves and almost dished Roosevelt’s hopes in 1932. The President had astutely asked Bennett Champ Clark, son of a victim of the requirement in 1912, to move the adoption of majority rule.

The convention came fully to life only when the President arrived at Philadelphia’s Franklin Field stadium to accept the nomination. Before a wildly enthusiastic throng of 100,000, he accused the opposition of seeking
to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. “Today,” he said, “we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.” Then the climactic sentences:

“Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected.
This
generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.…

“I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join—” A roar burst across the stadium and drowned out the final words: “with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.”

By midsummer both parties confronted a third force that suddenly seemed to be threatening. Both Coughlin and Townsend had been mustering their troops for action. They hated and feared Roosevelt, held the Republican old guard in utter contempt, and viewed each other with suspicion. The Kingfish was gone, but now two new leaders emerged. Gerald Smith proved to be not only a rousing tub-thumper but a coalition-builder. Befriending Townsend, he brought the doctor into contact with Coughlin and won the priest’s support for an alliance. Since all three men were prima donnas, a compromise candidate was needed. Congressman William Lemke of North Dakota, a longtime agrarian radical whose seamed, leathery face and rustic clothes belied his years at Georgetown University and Yale Law School, would serve. Soon he was denouncing the President as the “bewildered Kerensky of a provisional government” and Landon as “the dying shadow of a past civilization.” His hastily organized Union party boasted that it could command 25 million votes or more and at the least throw the election to Landon, thus paving the way to Huey Long’s great goal for 1940.

It was clear also by midsummer that Roosevelt had little to fear from the parties of the old left, even as balance-of-power forces. The age-old failure of the broad American labor-liberal-left to unite seemed almost caricatured in the Socialists’ internal divisions. At their convention in May they had renominated Norman Thomas but split over another issue; a large number of old-liners walked out and formed the Social Democratic Federation, leaving the Socialist party with a strong leftward tilt. Caught in the middle, Thomas saw some of his supporters move further to the left while others—including Hillman and Dubinsky—joined the New Deal camp.

American Communists also had their frustrations. Moscow’s switch to a
new popular front, antifascist strategy had left anti-New Deal zealots in an embarrassing position: after lambasting Roosevelt and his New Deal, now they must support him. Yet despite their deep distrust of the President, they much preferred him to Landon, whom they labeled a forerunner of fascism. While the Socialists shifted sharply to the left, Harvey Klehr noted, the Communists passed them headed to the right. Meantime the comrades unveiled their patriotic slogan
“COMMUNISM IS TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICANISM.”

The Republican campaigners were the first off the mark, and a good start it was, as Americans seemed to take to this outspoken Midwesterner with his sensible ideas and moderate positions. Buoyed by ample press support and good crowds, he attacked the New Deal at some of its weaker points and argued that he could meet the people’s needs more effectively and cheaply. As the weeks passed, however, he ran into more and more difficulties—his own fatigue, his repetitiousness, growing boredom and lack of response in the crowds. Moreover, he had no target, as FDR was lying low.

Landon’s nemesis was Herbert Hoover. Frozen out of the Landon campaign circle, thirsting for vindication, hating Roosevelt, the former President concluded that the candidate lacked fire and that he would provide it. Hoover’s attacks on the New Deal were so virulent as to be self-defeating, but in the process he and other hard-liners drew Landon into their vortex. Soon the Kansan was leveling extreme charges against his adversary. Pressured from the Republican right and the center, Landon never found a solid, consistent theme. By October his campaign was slowly and inexorably sinking, buoyed only by falsely optimistic polls in the
Literary Digest.

The campaign of the Union party proved an exercise in self-destruction, performed before an indifferent press and public. Landon’s troubles with Hoover were as nothing compared to Lemke’s with Coughlin. Virtually ignoring his party’s candidate, the radio priest concentrated his fire on Roosevelt as “anti-God,” anti-American, pro-Red. The New Deal was “a broken down Colossus,” he shouted, “its left leg standing on ancient Capitalism and its right mired in the red mud of Communism.” He carried his red-baiting of the Administration to such a point, with ominous undertones of anti-Semitism, that his bishop, his cardinal, and even the Vatican rebuked him. Undeterred, Coughlin boasted that he would throw Roosevelt out of his office just “as I was instrumental in removing Herbert Hoover,” and cried, “If I don’t deliver 9,000,000 votes for William Lemke, I’m through with radio forever.” Smith and even Townsend also became vituperative, but they were cool to each other, and to Lemke. With too many leaders and too little money and organization, the Union party was in tatters by the middle of the fall.

By then Roosevelt was just starting his formal campaign. Always a master of timing, he stood aside until his foes had exhausted themselves and their audiences. His crowds seemed to get bigger and more enthusiastic as theirs dwindled during the autumn days. Spoken with power and passion but without stridency, his radio addresses were unusually effective, reaching widely across the electorate. He knew, too, when to leave well enough alone: he let friendly Catholic hierarchs answer Coughlin; he ignored pinpricks; when some of his campaign leaders almost panicked in the wake of a telling last-minute Republican attack on Social Security taxes and “name tags,” the President kept his nerve. His final campaign trips through the Northeast could fairly be described as triumphal processions.

He brought his campaign to a stunning climax in Madison Square Garden before a crowd of enthusiasts who seemed to thirst for political blood:

“For nearly four years now you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. And I can assure you that we will keep our sleeves rolled up.

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

“
They
had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. And we know now that Government by
organized money
is just as dangerous as Government by
organized mob.

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for
me
—and I welcome their hatred.

“I should like to have it said of my first Administration”—Roosevelt’s voice was rising—“that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match.

“I should like to have it said—” A thunderclap of cheers and applause burst from the crowd.

“Wait a moment! I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.” The crowd let out a great guttural roar.

“
Of course
we will continue to seek to improve working conditions for the workers of America.…
Of course
we will continue to work for cheaper electricity.…
Of course
we will continue our efforts in behalf of the farmers of America … for young men and women … for the crippled, for the blind, for the mothers.…

“For these things, too, and for a multitude of things like them,
we have only just begun to fight.
”

F
OR MORE THAN ONE
hundred years, ever since Jeffersonian times, presidential candidates of humane and liberal tendencies had been seeking to muster popular majorities strong and stout enough to sustain their work. Their success had been mixed at best. Lincoln and Wilson won office, but only with a minority of the popular vote against divided opposition. Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt won popular majorities only to encounter opposition inside the governmental or party system. Somehow conservative Republican leadership had been able to achieve “compact majorities,” especially in the late nineteenth century and in the 1920s. Somehow liberal Democrats and progressive Republicans had been unable to create durable majority coalitions.

Suddenly, on Wednesday morning, November 4, 1936, the political landscape seemed altered and the old hope renewed. It was not merely a Roosevelt victory, the press proclaimed, but a tidal wave, an earthquake, a landslide, “the blizzard of ’36.” The President carried every state save Maine and Vermont, swept the electoral college by 523 to 8, won the popular vote by 27,748,000 to 16,680,000. Lemke’s 892,000 votes amounted to less than 2 percent of the total. The outcome was historic: Roosevelt had won the largest presidential vote up to that time, the largest presidential plurality, the largest proportion of electoral voles since 1820; he had helped win the largest House majority since 1855, the largest Senate majority since 1869. The new House would have 331 Democrats and 89 Republicans, with 13 members of other parties; the Senate, 76 Democrats, 16 Republicans, and 4 “others.” The Democratic hurricane swept through state legislatures and county courthouses across the nation. And the Democrats for the first time made deep inroads into the black vote.

So Franklin Roosevelt had his majority, a magnificent majority in electoral breadth and legislative depth. What would he do with it? Few doubted that he would have to face up to the one lingering majority of conservatives—that on the Supreme Court. Later on, some would propagate the myth that the President, intoxicated with his success, suddenly and recklessly pounced on the High Court. In fact, the battle was long in the
making, for it reflected a conflict built deep into the heart of the constitutional system, popular attitudes, and the ambitions of leaders.

The Framers of the Constitution had been deeply ambivalent toward the idea and practice of majority rule. Believers in republican government, they had to accept the ultimate power of the people as expressed in electoral and legislative majorities. But as devout believers too in minority rights, they wished to curb the power of popular majorities, composed perhaps of debt-ridden farmers, to invade property rights. For them Shays’s rebellion early in 1787 had been the great warning bell in the night. At Philadelphia the founders shaped a constitution that would thwart sudden and passionate expressions of the popular will. A majority would need to win the House of Representatives, the presidency, and the Senate before it could work its will—and its will might be cooled off in the process as surely as cold milk could chill hot tea. And if all this failed, there would be the courts, which would exercise some major, though not wholly defined, restraints on legislative and executive policy.

Not all the founding fathers favored such curbs on popular rule. Thomas Jefferson, who was absent from the Philadelphia convention but always present in the Framers’ thoughts, not only backed legislative majority rule but talked grandly about popular rule and the right of the people to revolt every generation or so. To be sure, Jefferson, as a libertarian and democrat, set as a “sacred principle that if the will of the Majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable”—it must not violate the minority’s “equal rights.” But he had confidence that a majority of free Americans would never trample on the liberties of fellow Americans as guaranteed in bills of rights.

While FDR spurned grandiose constitutional theory, he had a good working knowledge of the Framers’ checks and balances as vehicles for frustrating popular impulses and thwarting social change. He had learned even more from historical narratives, as a politician delving into the past in order to defend his positions of the present. But most of all he learned from people—from Jefferson and Jackson and their difficulties with the Federalist-Whig court of John Marshall, from Lincoln, from the judicial erosion of black rights during Reconstruction, and above all from Cousin Ted’s blasts against reactionary judges.