Forgotten Man, The (33 page)

“P
ROUD AGAIN TO BE
J
OSEPH
S
CHECHTER’S WIFE
.”
Below
: the
Schechter brothers
and their lawyer,
Joseph Heller
, celebrate (
Heller on brothers’ shoulders
) [T
HE
G
RANGER
C
OLLECTION
, N
EW
Y
ORK
].
Above
:
Felix Frankfurter
[AP I
MAGES
]. Shortly after FDR’s
Schechter
defeat, Frankfurter moved into the White House for the summer to help FDR strategize a legislative comeback. Roosevelt later named him Supreme Court justice.

“T
HANKS
.” In 1936,
Roosevelt
wagered that by spending enough cash and creating enough new laws, he could at least give the impression of recovery. That year Washington supplanted the states as Americans’ most important government when federal spending outpaced state and local spending. Voters rewarded FDR for his generosity and goodwill with a landslide, just as Clarence Batchelor had predicted they would with this cartoon. The opposition, from the Liberty League to Father Coughlin, proved shrill and marginal. [T
HE
G
RANGER
C
OLLECTION
, N
EW
Y
ORK
]

I
NCONSISTENT
. Justice Department attorneys and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau refused to accept good intentions as an excuse from a target when it came to tax return accuracy. In this letter, which accompanied the president’s 1937 return, Roosevelt suggests that good intentions suffice in his own case. [FDR L
IBRARY
]

“W
E ARE FASHIONING AN INSTRUMENT OF UNIMAGINED POWER
.” Roosevelt’s administration grew bold and mounted a second revolution in the second term.
Above
:
Tom Corcoran
, attorney for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, appearing in 1935 before a congressional committee to defend tactics promoting the radical “death sentence” act. Later he would be yet bolder.
Below
:
John Brophy
(
left
) of the old Russia trip, now point man on “K” Street for the CIO, with Homer Martin of the young United Auto Workers and
John L. Lewis
. The Wagner Act opened a new world for labor organizers. [AP I
MAGES
]

As head of the Resettlement Administration,
Rex Tugwell
(
above, with child
) became godfather to the rural poor [F
ARM
S
ECURITY
A
DMINISTRATION
—O
FFICE OF
W
AR
I
NFORMATION
P
HOTOGRAPH
C
OLLECTION
]. The poverty was real, but so was the RA’s effort to propagandize for itself.
Below
: the New Dealers’ most famous photograph, “Migrant Mother,” and
Dorothea Lange
, the photographer who took it [T
HE
G
RANGER
C
OLLLECTION
, N
EW
Y
ORK
]. Tugwell recruited his old Columbia colleague Roy Stryker to document the need for government work; Stryker, in turn, employed Lange.

B
LACK
T
UESDAY
, A
GAIN
. So severe was the downturn in the late 1930s that two in ten men were again unemployed. The new demand by organized labor for higher pay was one of the causes of this depression within the Depression. Another was the administration’s continued insistence on the perpetual right to experiment.
Left
: New Dealer
Stuart Chase
(
seated on right
) debates a representative of the Lake Carriers Association [AP I
MAGES
]. The latter criticized the “trend of centralization of power.”
Right
: Union man
John Brophy
leads picketers [AP I
MAGES
].
Below
:
Willkie
and
Irita Van Doren
[L
IBRARY OF
C
ONGRESS
]. She helped him to lay out a classically liberal vision—and to show where FDR was illiberal.