American Experiment (324 page)

The man people most vividly remembered in their mourning was the FDR who had electrified the nation on entering the White House hardly more than a dozen years before. That Roosevelt had touched their hearts and minds and bodies with a reassuring immediacy; the enduring effects of FDR’s leadership in peace and war remained to be tested. The New Deal laws and programs had virtually transformed major aspects of American life—economic security, agriculture, labor relations, banking, welfare, conservation, and much else. FDR had bequeathed the powers and structure of the modern presidency, its penetrating impact on people’s lives, an expanded and rejuvenated federal government. He had mobilized millions of new voters and partially realigned the balance of parties. And as William Leuchtenburg later made clear, he would cast his shadow over future presidencies by setting the agenda of policy, establishing the standards for measuring presidential leadership, leaving a federal government filled with his people and his ideas.

Roosevelt’s greatest service to mankind, Isaiah Berlin wrote from a British perspective, was proving it possible “to be politically effective and yet benevolent and human”; that “the promotion of social justice and individual liberty” did not necessarily mean the end of effective government; that “individual liberty—a loose texture of society”—could be reconciled with “the indispensable minimum of organizing and authority.”

It was harder to assess the man than the presidency. “Great men have two lives,” Adolf Berle said in a tribute to his old boss, “one which occurs while they work on this earth; a second which begins at the day of their death and continues as long as their ideas and conceptions remain powerful.” But the more Roosevelt’s “second life”—his heritage of ideas and decisions, examples and innovations—was examined, the more fragmented it appeared to be. For not only did Roosevelt conduct multiple and sometimes clashing policies at any one time, he shifted from plan to plan, from program to program, with such nonchalance as to leave his friends perplexed and his adversaries aiming at a moving target.

He started off as a crisis manager who simultaneously economized in order to balance the budget, pushed through a socialistic venture in the Tennessee Valley, tightened and expanded the regulation of banking and agriculture, and sought to concert the interests of workers and industrialists under the NRA. Soon he gave up on economizing, began to spend lavishly on emergency relief projects and later on the WPA, built and
restored bridges, dams, roads, and other public services while diverting funds to construct aircraft carriers, went in for major relief expenditures as he approached the 1936 election, reverted to economizing after it, then turned back to heavier spending in the recession years of 1938 and 1939. Meantime FDR experimented with such imaginative ventures as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, rural electrification, soil conservation, housing subsidies.

He held mixed views about private and public centralization. The New Deal monopoly policies, economist Ellis Hawley concluded, were a study in “economic confusion,” as Washington shifted from government-sponsored cartelization under the NRA, marketing agreements, and coal policy to trustbusting rhetoric and antimonopoly measures such as the Wheeler-Rayburn utility holding company act. New Deal economic planning, according to Hawley, came in a “disjointed, almost haphazard manner, in response to specific pressures, problems, and needs, and without benefit of any preconceived plan or integrating theory.” Herbert Stein summarized the first four years as “fiscal drift.” That term and the next left an ambiguous heritage to later administrations.

Juggling economic policies from day to day amid his own Tocquevillian void, Roosevelt did not always exhibit grace under pressure. During the economic crisis in spring 1938 he had angry meetings with Morgenthau, whom the President evidently felt he could safely rebuke as an old friend and neighbor. The Treasury Secretary for his part grumbled in his extensive diary about Roosevelt’s “helterskelter” planning and his lost sense of proportion. A year later, with unemployment still ranging up toward 10 million, the President and the Secretary were still wrangling, Morgenthau was still talking about resignation, Eleanor Roosevelt was still talking him out of it. When Morgenthau asked for an appointment to present a statement on taxation—two hours, he thought, would be needed—his boss asked him instead to leave it so that he could “read it a little bit at a time at my bedside.”

Seeking some intellectual order in the disarray of Roosevelt’s economic programs, historians identified a first and second New Deal, but there were in fact several New Deals as the President groped for the key to full recovery. Historians discerned a third New Deal late in Roosevelt’s second term that emanated from his effort to find institutional solutions to faltering economic strategies. Thwarted in his efforts to build an executive-legislative-judicial team, he sought to improve presidential planning by creating the National Resources Planning Board under a Delano uncle, establishing more presidential control over “independent” regulatory commissions, enlarging the White House policy staff, proposing the
“Seven TVA’s bill” that would establish regional planning authorities in the Missouri and other great riverbeds. Most of these efforts failed in the face of bureaucratic inertia and congressional fears of “fascist type” concentration of power that would destroy state and local authority.

It would remain for World War II to supply Washington with the authority, the planning and enforcement tools, and the purposefulness that earlier New Deal efforts had lacked. Massive doses of “war Keynesianism” and military manpower drafts finally enabled the “fourth New Deal” to realize its supreme aim of ending unemployment. In the mushrooming of federal agencies and personnel, the huge military planning agencies, the centralization of authority, the subordination of courts and Congress, the New Deal found the firm linkage of ends and means that had eluded it during Roosevelt’s first two terms. The irony of war prosperity was inescapable.

The domestic New Deal ended up as a lavish policy feast, which later Presidents and Congresses could use as precedents and learning experiences, especially in the realms of economic reform and social welfare. The New Deal recruited a brilliant corps of innovators, planners, and dreamers who invigorated later administrations, Republican as well as Democratic, for decades. The tragedy of the domestic New Deal was that it failed to fashion an effective economic strategy and stick with it. Conceivably a rigorous and sustained budget-balancing effort from the start would have encouraged, as in past economic cycles, a sharp recovery of investor confidence, but Roosevelt for reasons both humanitarian and political soon rejected this harsh policy. Conceivably the NRA could have been reorganized after its voiding by the High Court and converted into a comprehensive venture in industrial rationalization and economic planning, but the President gave up on it. He favored somewhat redistributionist tax policies, but not to the extent where they might have served as a decisive step toward a more egalitarian society. He played with antimonopoly policies, regionalization, encouragement of local initiatives without ever surrendering his strong reliance on national action. Above all he failed to carry through the one strategy that was politically the most feasible and economically the soundest for a depressed economy—broad fiscal planning encompassing monetary, investment, pricing, interest rate, public works, and welfare policies, a strategy based not on occasional “pump priming” but on the heavy and continuous deficit spending that later fueled the war economy.

If the New Deal domestic heritage was mixed at best, the image of the head New Dealer remained clear and vibrant in the people’s memory—that of a cheerful, buoyant, warmhearted man absolutely committed to his goals of economic recovery and social justice, a very political man who
could strike deals and manipulate men and win elections, an orator who could touch people’s hearts as they sat by a fireside, a man who always seemed in motion despite the polio-wasted legs of which, at least in public, he never complained and never explained. He had his bad days when he was negative and critical and even spiteful but he always bounced back, causing Morgenthau or Ickes or some other complainer to put his resignation statement back into his pocket and hearken anew to his boss’s uncertain trumpet.

A dozen years later Holmes’s perception could be both affirmed and extended—a first-class temperament and second-class intellect, yes, but also, throughout the presidential years, superb intelligence and rarely failing insight.

As a war leader too, Roosevelt was a deeply divided man—divided between the Soldier of the Faith, the principled leader, the man of ideals, crusading for a spacious and coherent vision, and the man of
Realpolitik,
Machiavelli’s Prince, the leader intent on narrow, manageable, short-run goals, careful always to protect and husband his power in a world of shifting moods and capricious fortune. This dualism not only cleft Roosevelt but divided his advisers within themselves and from one another. And it reflected central dichotomies within the American people, who vacillated between the evangelical moods of idealism, sentimentalism, and utopianism and traditions of national self-protection, prudence, and power politics.

Roosevelt demonstrated his purposeful, principled, steady, and coherent leadership most strikingly as Commander-in-Chief and war propagandist. He brilliantly articulated the ideals of freedom for which the nation fought and he provided ample and steadfast support to the men and women who were fighting for those ideals. For a leader who had intervened almost promiscuously in the decisions of his domestic agencies he was remarkably self-restrained in dealing with his generals and admirals. Even when he might have exploited some incident for his own political gain—as in the case of General George Patton’s slapping two soldiers in Sicily—he was silent. For a highly political man, he left selection of his generals to the top command; even Stimson acknowledged his “scrupulous abstention from personal and political pressure.” He overturned few sentences after courts-martial.

As an old navy man the Commander-in-Chief offered numerous suggestions and queries to the armed services, but he largely left them alone. Only when it came to political matters did he exert close authority. He
insisted on the principle of unconditional surrender, arousing misgivings among some in the Pentagon even though it flowed directly out of the American military tradition. Roosevelt recognized the political significance of the doctrine, which had been fully vetted in the State Department, for maintaining unity among the Rainbow Coalition, discouraging divisive surrender offers by the enemy, and setting things straight for postwar peacekeeping efforts. Robert Dallek concluded that Roosevelt was the “principal architect” of the basic strategic decisions that brought the early defeat of the Axis.

Roosevelt the Prince, the global politician, the Machiavellian leader, lived uneasily with Roosevelt the Soldier of the Faith. FDR dealt not only with Churchill behind Stalin’s back but with Stalin behind Churchill’s. He misled the American people on his aggressive posture in the Atlantic. He failed to communicate to Polish leaders—or to the American people—the full gravity of Soviet intransigence about their western borders. He did not share atomic secrets with his Russian ally. Remembering talks with Roosevelt during wartime, de Gaulle was to write of FDR’s “light touches,” made “so skillfully that it was difficult to contradict this artist, this seducer, in any categorical way.” In numberless other political decisions—or in military decisions involving politics—Roosevelt manipulated, dissimulated, horse-traded, always on the grounds that this was the prudent or practical or realistic way to act.

He appeared to combine the most striking qualities of his two great presidential mentors—the martial vigor of Theodore Roosevelt and the idealism of Woodrow Wilson. But just as both those qualities were evident in both those men, FDR appeared to embrace principle and
Realpolitik
almost indiscriminately. Part of his strength lay in this; it was hard to know what Roosevelt one was dealing with. William James had spoken of the “once-born,” those who easily fitted into the ideology of their time, and of those “divided selves” who went through a second birth, seizing on a second ideology. Raised in a stable and secure home, comfortable in his self-identity despite some injuries to his self-esteem, Roosevelt in many respects was the classic once-born leader. But he shifted so widely in his priorities of political leadership during his long career that he appeared at least thrice-born—not only as Dr. New Deal and Dr. Win-the-War but ultimately as Dr. Win-the-Peace.

Both Roosevelt’s idealism and his
Realpolitik
were effective; the problem lay in the linkage between the two. He often failed to work out the intermediary ends and means necessary to accomplish his purposes. Thus he could proclaim unconditional surrender but practice some kind of deal with Darlan and later the Italians. The more he preached his lofty ends and
practiced his limited means, the more he widened the gap between popular expectations and actual possibilities. Not only did this derangement of ends and means lead to crushed hopes and disillusion at home; it would help sow the seeds of cold war later. The Kremlin contrasted Roosevelt’s coalition rhetoric with his Britain-first strategy and falsely suspected a bourgeois conspiracy to destroy Soviet communism. Indians and Chinese contrasted his anticolonial words with his military concessions to colonial powers, and falsely inferred that he was an imperialist at heart and a hypocrite to boot.

Like most of the more effective Presidents, Roosevelt made his White House years a magnificent learning experience for himself and those around him. Like the great teaching Presidents in the early years of the republic—notably Washington, Jefferson, Jackson—he educated the American people in the uses of government to achieve great national purposes. Like the other world leaders of his time, he aroused people’s hopes, converted them into expectations and entitlements, and then responded to the demands that his followers—now become leaders—put on
him.
Like the stronger Presidents of the past century—notably Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson—he moved broadly to the left of the political spectrum in which he operated. But if his commitment to liberty and equality—to freedom—was realized most fully and paradoxically in the war years, he ended up in this posture as the result not of a steady evolution but rather of a series of jumps from role to role, as in the case of Dr. New Deal shifting suddenly to Dr. Win-the-War.