Forgotten Man, The (43 page)

There had been another June signal of FDR’s inexorability when 9,200 doctors attended an American Medical Association meeting in Atlantic City. The mood was a happy one: the physicians were looking at a new drug that seemed to conquer bacterial infections. It was called sulfanilamide. An expert from Pittsburgh, Ralph Robertson
Mellon—no kin to Andrew—reported that this drug apparently could cure “certain types of pneumonia, typhoid, brain abscesses, scarlet fever and meningitis.” Other doctors reported similar wonders.

But the doctors were distracted even from the miraculous sulfanilamide when a representative of the New York State Medical Society, Joseph Kopetzky, spoke. Kopetzky, an ear doctor, suggested a plan that would alter their very independence as professionals: the nationalization of health care. Under the plan, as reported by
Time,
“Every one of the 150,000 U.S. doctors must become an officer in the Federal Public Health Service.” The federal government would pay for whatever service citizens could not pay. There likely would be a new secretary of social welfare. The doctors debated long into the night as to how the American Medical Association might reply. They paid such attention because they heard that Roosevelt had already seen Kopetzky. The doctors might not know everything, but by now they understood that once Roosevelt made a project his, he would not give up—unless someone stopped him.

January 1937
Unemployment (January): 15.1 percent
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 179

ONE MORNING IN JANUARY
1937, about two weeks before Roosevelt was inaugurated, several reporters in New York showed up at an unusually large new office building overlooking New York’s East River. They had come downtown to meet a new figure: Rex Tugwell, Wall Street man.

Tugwell had resigned his post as undersecretary of agriculture after the election, and this time Roosevelt had not blocked him. Tugwell guessed that the cost of having him around had simply become too high for the president. The greenbelts and projects like Casa Grande were impossibly controversial. “Franklin did not doubt my loyalty any more than he ever had, I am sure, but he had been half persuaded—and Eleanor even more than he—that I had totalitarian leanings,” Tugwell would later write.

Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration, which had stood alone, was
now slated to become a suboffice of the Agriculture Department. Living with that fact alone would have been hard to tolerate. Tugwell also had personal matters to deal with. He was thinking of leaving his wife and marrying his assistant from the RA, Grace Falke. He told himself that New York would be a better place to sort things out than Washington. He had an apartment at 460 Riverside Drive. It was time to go.

Still, the overnight transformation from New Deal bureaucrat to New York executive at 120 Wall was bold even for Tugwell. After all, the projects he had started were still functioning, and his staffers were still dressed in the khakis of fieldwork. In May Dorothea Lange would travel to the area around Casa Grande and photograph the long-limbed, destitute children of migrants—evidence of the need for resettlement projects like his model farm. Yet here was Tugwell, dressed in blue serge, standing before reporters at a nineteenth-floor office. The reporters learned that Tugwell would be a vice president at American Molasses Company, a sugar concern. The company belonged to New Deal friends: the Taussig family. Charlie Taussig was an old New Dealer, and Adolf Berle sat on the American Molasses board. The visitors saw that Tugwell had twenty roses on his new desk, a gift from the board of American Molasses.

Tugwell reminded the reporters that this was not his first experience in the private sector. He had worked for his father’s canning business, the same one that he had fined as an agriculture department official three years earlier. He clearly feared he might be caught flat-footed on the facts about the company—“But don’t ask me about cotton. I’m a molasses man,” he had joked earlier with reporters. One reporter now asked him what he thought about getting a Social Security number. After all, the Social Security program payroll taxes were beginning and the numbers were a novelty for the country. Here Tugwell did blunder: “I’m out of that class,” he replied, confused. Taussig corrected the slip—Tugwell would be a salaried employee and get a number. He would get a number and would pay into the new program like all the rest.

Taussig also explained Tugwell’s move to the press: “In these
changing times every business needs the service of men trained in economics, with a broad objective social viewpoint.” The
Times
reporter gave the impression that Tugwell didn’t mind leaving government; after all, it reported him as saying, “many of the things he had planned are being carried out.” The headline the next day read, “Tugwell Bit Hazy about His New Job.”

Tugwell was not the only New York intellectual feeling “hazy” and reexamining his old convictions. The news from abroad dominated the headlines: Stalin was executing one old hero of the Soviet Union after another in secret or semisecret proceedings. The whole idea of being on the Left was changing. Legitimately frightened by Hitler, some found themselves moving close to Soviet Russia despite themselves. A new divide was emerging among the intellectuals.

Some still supported Stalin. In March 1937 Corliss Lamont, the son of Thomas W., wrote a plea for liberal unity stating that “we believe that the Soviet Union needs the support of liberals at this moment, when the forces of fascism, led by Hitler, threaten to engulf Europe.” Paul Douglas’s ex-wife, Dorothy Douglas, signed it, as did the writer Lillian Hellman; Robert Lynd, the author of
Middletown;
and Louis Fischer, who had been in Moscow during the 1927 visit.

But others were anxious. Stuart Chase still wrote admiringly about the Soviet experiment from time to time. But he was shifting his attention to a new topic: words and their meanings. “We have circled all around ‘capital,’ and ‘capitalism,’” he wrote, “but made little progress in defining them.” That June, Harvey Chase, his father, would write to Roosevelt about Stuart’s forthcoming book, which would be titled
The Tyranny of Words.
Chase Sr. briefed the president: “No longer a socialist, communist, or collectivist, he has become a semanticist.”

And some of the old Left were simply appalled. Suzanne La Follette, a member of the clan of liberal reformers, now pointed to Russia as the very opposite of her definition of liberalism. She penned an angry public letter to the
Nation,
which had not taken a clear stand against the trials: “I shall not be surprised if within ten years the
Nation
’s left-handed endorsement of Stalin’s liquidations of the October Revolution is something that its editors would prefer to
forget.” Paul Douglas was likewise shocked. The next year Douglas would happen to be reading an item in the
New York Times
about a Trotskyite leader whom the Russian secret police had executed, and recognized the name with a start: Betty Glan. It was the Russian woman who had come up to him on his 1927 tour. Murdering one’s corevolutionists seemed the very opposite of the liberalism the American Left saw as part of the spirit of revolution. What was the point of revolution, anywhere, if it led to this? Even if the New Deal had been proceeding perfectly, the Soviet Union would have caused them to question their old precepts.

And the New Deal was not proceeding perfectly. The national economy might have moved forward, but it still was not back to 1929 levels. “Everything was not happy in New York,” either Tugwell would write of the city in that period. The bookish types did not care that it was New York (the Yankees) versus New York (the Giants) in the World Series. Now—perhaps because it was not a campaign year—the intellectuals in the city found themselves talking about the New Deal with the business community, whose doubts were stronger and older. In Washington, Roosevelt might seem invincible and 1937 might seem the year for permanent revolution. But that was Washington. In New York, for the intellectuals at least, 1937 would be a year of self-doubt.

The doubt began with a personal shock—the reminder that not everyone approved of the way the intellectuals and New Dealers had executed their ideas. Columbia had granted Tugwell several leaves to serve in Washington, but now the university was telling him it could not welcome him back. His former dean at the Wharton School, who now led the Economics Department at Columbia, gave him the news. “I meekly sent in my resignation and Columbia’s hands were washed of me permanently,” he would write later. This was “perhaps the hardest to bear.”

Roosevelt had so often advised him not to mind the bad press, but now Tugwell could see that that press would have a permanent cost. As Harcourt Brace, a publisher of a textbook he had written, would report that year, sales of the book had gone down when a
school superintendent in Gary, Indiana, William Wirt, attacked Tugwell as a leftist. These were consequences he now had to confront. He was after all an academic—a man who liked to experiment, to speak his mind. Uncertain, Tugwell boarded the
Scanpenn
in late January with Charlie Taussig. The ocean liner headed for the Caribbean. But the feeling could not be the same as it had been traveling the warm waters with Roosevelt on his
Potomac.

Within a month, Tugwell had cause to reconnect with his old chief. While in Barbados, Tugwell learned that his twenty-year-old daughter, Tanis, had fallen ill with double pneumonia and entered Presbyterian Medical Center. It was hard to secure a flight north. Turning to the old familiar hand for help, Tugwell cabled Roosevelt. And the hand was there: Roosevelt asked Juan Trippe of Pan Am to hold a plane at Trinidad for Tugwell. Even this was not enough, for only a fishing smack was available to take Tugwell to Trinidad. In the end Pan Am helped out with a special flight from Barbados to Trinidad as well. Two Costa Ricans were bumped, but Tugwell made it to Tanis’s bedside. The daughter recovered. It is hard not to read a bit of wistfulness in the act of the ex-undersecretary turning to his ex-boss. Tugwell’s relationship with Roosevelt was still in the news, but often as a form of ridicule: in March the papers carried some material on Roosevelt’s farming diversions in Georgia. The president had two mules, the story noted, “Hop” and “Tug,” after Hopkins and Tugwell. In March the papers carried bad news: the first of Tugwell’s projects, twelve rural settlements, were writing off 25 percent of their costs as unsustainable. The freestanding communities he had envisioned were not becoming reality. Tugwell’s doubt in this instance was not about the reception of the New Deal; it was about the actual success of the programs themselves.

Tugwell did not speak publicly of regrets. Nor did he criticize the Roosevelt team—he was loyal. But Moley, who was now at
Newsweek,
a new competitor of
Time,
was definitively breaking with the president. Speaking at a meeting of advertisers, he talked about the lexicon of the New Deal. He praised the New Deal—up to 1935. Since then, however, there had arisen “new and fantastic counter
parts” to the early New Deal. These later counterparts were too intrusive, and Moley could not approve of them.

In May the city itself provided reminders of the conflicts inherent in the New Deal. Roosevelt had created the Works Progress Administration to help labor; the same thought was behind his signature of the NIRA and the Wagner Act. But he had warned that the government would not always be able to afford to pay for the jobs. Now Roosevelt wanted to balance the budget, and some WPA jobs had to go. Instead of accepting the change, as perhaps Roosevelt expected them to do, the WPA workers were mimicking their private-sector brothers and striking. This seemed like ingratitude. How much, after all, could the government pay them? As if that was not sufficient, the WPA workers were striking not merely over labor but also over the political positions that newspapers were taking.

The
New York Daily News
editorialized against the WPA, arguing that it ought to be abolished in favor of an entity less subject to the sway of “politicians and communists.” Local workers of the WPA promptly announced a “mighty mass protest” against the paper. Writers on staff at the Federal Writers’ Project staged a sit-down strike across the street from the
News
at 235 East Forty-second Street. Even Hallie Flanagan of the theater group went along. In the same weeks she noted that the WPA workers were striking for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Most New Deal supporters were more uncertain—in New York or elsewhere. They were taken aback at the brutality of unionization across the country. Some automakers had already unionized—General Motors, for example. But in Detroit, Henry Ford was still holding out. The basis of Ford’s protest was that Ford could not afford the cost of unionization, logically enough. Companies like Ford were taking the position that it was illegal for strikers to strike within the factories—it was a trespass, a violation of company property rights.

Emboldened by the Wagner Act and its ambiguous language, the workers went farther—onto company property. Ford’s company police retaliated by beating the protestors at its River Rouge plant, including a UAW organizer named Walter Reuther.
Time
reported
that the workers were demanding a higher per-hour wage than offered by Ford or any other automaker. Reuther’s battered face would become a national emblem of company brutality.

On Chicago’s South Side, Douglas was rethinking things. “These sit-down strikes resembled the seizure of factories by the Italian unions in the fall of 1920,” he would write. On Memorial Day weekend workers at Republic Steel paraded, pushing to get the company to unionize as U.S. Steel already had. Police turned on the crowd with revolvers and clubs, clubbing and killing even workers fleeing the scene. Douglas, still a professor, was asked by the editor of the
Chicago Times
to look into the Little Steel Massacre. He agreed, and moderated a protest meeting held at Insull’s opera house.

Two problems stood out, observers noted. The first, again, involved the legality of the strikers’ behavior. Both sides, Wall Street and unions, had worked so long and hard to see the Wagner Act passed; the idea all along had been to create a legal basis for protest. Now, instead of staying within the safe confines of the law, the protestors were pushing the envelope, seeing how far they could take the country. The strikes had the effect of escalating the battle: “They frightened most employers,” concluded Douglas. To him and others the pattern—concession followed by escalation and radicalization—seemed far too much like not only Italy but Russia after Kerensky or Germany after Weimar for comfort.

The next problem was that the Communists were clearly active in the union movement. Lewis defended the practice, but many of the original labor supporters were apoplectic—Green at the American Federation of Labor, for instance. Douglas was also disturbed. He would complete the report on the Little Steel Massacre, Douglas recalled telling the Chicago paper in his memoir, but only if Communists were not assigned to work on the project with him. The boot steps of the fascists of Europe rang in Douglas’s ears. He feared both the Communist Left and the Right. He had heard Benito Mussolini announce Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia at the Piazza Venezia in Rome. Now he was becoming convinced that for the American Left to ignore all this was wrong, and that “isolationism was impossible and paci
fism self-defeating against dictators.” Frances Perkins, too, uttered her concern: “unwise and demoralizing,” she concluded of the sit-downs.