Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (49 page)

Intellectuals bitterly resented their own plight and the misery all around which it reflected. But they reacted in different ways. Some just reported what they saw. In one of the best of the Depression articles, ‘New York in the Third Winter’, James Thurber noted the contrasts and the ironies. Of the eighty-six legitimate theatres in the city, only twenty-eight had shows running: but O’Neill’s
Mourning Becomes Electra
had sold out even its $6 seats. About 1,600 of the 20,000 taxis had ‘dropped out’; but the rest were much smarter and cleaner as a result of intensified competition. Both the Ritz and the Pierre had cut their lowest room rates to a humiliating $6; but the new Waldorf, charging the same as before, was packed. The new Empire State, the last product of the great Twenties building boom, had only rented a third of its rooms: ‘Many floors were not finished at all, merely big plastery spaces’; but 550,000 people had already paid a dollar to go up to the top. The big transatlantic liners were cutting their suite prices by a third; but ‘whoopee cruises’ beyond the twelve-mile-limit-ban on gambling were a roaring success. So was bridge, with Ely Culbertson selling 400,000 books a year and the industry racking up a turnover of $100 million, and the new striptease shows, with dancers earning $475 a week. Above all, he reported bargains in the big stores, which slashed their prices and kept up business accordingly. Indeed, it is a significant fact that the retail trade, reacting directly to market conditions, was the least depressed sector of the economy; industry, trapped by Hoover’s iron law of high wages, was sandbagged.
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Thurber’s reporting stressed that for anyone who could actually make or earn money, Depressions were the best of times.

Most intellectuals moved sharply to the Left, or rather into politics for the first time, presenting their newly discovered country in crude, ideological colours. Thomas Wolfe, the baroque writing phenomenon of the Thirties, described the public lavatories outside New York’s City Hall, where an astonishing proportion of America’s two million derelicts congregated:

… drawn into a common stew of rest and warmth and a little surcease from their desperation …. The sight was revolting, disgusting, enough to render a man forever speechless with very pity. [Nearby were] the giant hackles of Manhattan shining coldly in the cruel brightness of the winter night. The Woolworth building was not fifty yards away, and a little further down were the silvery spires and needles of Wall Street, great fortresses of stone and steel that housed enormous banks … in the cold moonlight, only a few blocks away from this abyss of human wretchedness and misery, blazed the pinnacles of power where a large section of the world’s entire wealth was locked in mighty vaults.
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Edmund Wilson, whose Depression articles were collected as
The American Jitters
(1932), eschewed the rhetoric but powerfully reflected the growing anti-enterprise sentiment which was overwhelming the country. Books might not be bought but more people were reading serious ones than ever before. He recognized shrewdly that a good time – or rather an influentual time – for intellectuals had come: especially for the younger ones ‘who had grown up in the Big Business era and had always resented its barbarism, its crowding-out of everything they cared about’. For them, ‘these years were not depressing but stimulating. One couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden, unexpected collapse of the stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom; and it gave us a new sense of power.’
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For it is a curious fact that writers, the least organized in their own lives, instinctively support planning in the public realm. And at the beginning of the Thirties planning became the new
Weltanschauung.
In 1932 it dominated the booklists: Stuart Chase, so embarrassingly wrong about the ‘continuing boom’ in October 1929, now published
A New Deal
, its title as timely as Bruck’s
The Third Reich.
George Soule demanded Hooveresque works-programmes in
A Planned Society.
Corporatist planning reached its apotheosis in Adolf Berle’s and Gardiner Means’s
Modern Corporation and Private Property
, which went through twenty impressions as the Depression climaxed and predicted that the ‘law of corporations’ would be the ‘potential constitutional law’ for the new economic state.

Everyone wanted planning. America’s most widely read historian, Charles Beard, advocated ‘A Five Year Plan for America’.
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Businessmen like Gerard Swope, head of General Electric, produced their
own. Henry Harriman, Chairman of the New England Power Company, declared, ‘We have left the period of extreme individualism …. Business prosperity and employment will be best maintained by an intelligent planned business structure.’ Capitalists who disagreed would be ‘treated like any maverick … roped and branded and made to run with the herd’. Charles Abbott of the American Institute of Steel Construction declared the country could no longer afford ‘irresponsible, ill-informed, stubborn and non-co-operative individualism’.
Business Week
, under the sneering title ‘Do You Still Believe in Lazy-Fairies?’, asked: ‘To plan or not to plan is no longer the question. The real question is: who is to do it?’
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Who, in logic and justice, but the Great Engineer, the Wonder Boy? Had not, in logic and justice, his time come at last? But there is no logic or justice in history. It is all a matter of chronology. Hoover’s time had come and gone. He had been in power four years, frantically acting and planning, and what was the result? By 1932 his advisers were telling him to ‘keep off the front page’ as his public acts were discrediting the notion that the government could intervene effectively.
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He had warned himself in 1929 that if some unprecedented calamity should come upon this nation I would be sacrificed to the unreasoning disappointment of a people who had expected too much.’ That fear – confidently dismissed at the time – proved abundantly justified. In 1907 Theodore Roosevelt had remarked that ‘when the average man loses his money, he is simply like a wounded snake and strikes right and left at anything, innocent or the reverse, that represents itself as conspicuous in his mind’.
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That maxim, too, was now resoundingly confirmed, with Hoover as its helpless victim, a transfixed rabbit in a boiled shirt. He had always been a dour man; now, imperceptibly, he became the Great Depressive. The ablest of his cabinet colleagues, Henry Stimson, said he avoided the White House to escape ‘the ever-present feeling of gloom that pervades everything connected with this Administration’. He added: ‘I don’t remember there has ever been a joke cracked in a single meeting of the last year and a half.’ As his party and cabinet colleagues distanced themselves from this voodoo-figure, Hoover began to keep an ‘enemies list’ of the disloyal.
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Calling on the beleaguered man, H.G.Wells found him ‘sickly, overworked and overwhelmed’.
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And as usually happens on these occasions, sheer luck deserts the ruined cause and becomes the source of further myth. In 1924 a Bonus bill had provided army veterans with service certificates and the right to borrow 22
per cent of their matured value. In 1931, over Hoover’s veto, Congress raised that to 50 per cent. Some of the veterans were not content and the Left, reviving for the first time since 1919, organized a ‘Bonus expeditionary force’ of 20,000
veterans which set up a shanty-town ‘camp’ in the middle of Washington in 1932. But Congress refused to budge further and on 28 July Hoover, whose policy on the issue was identical to Roosevelt’s when the issue was revived in 1936, ordered the camp to be dispersed. The police proving inadequate, some troops were used under Major (later General) Patton of the US Cavalry. Both General MacArthur, then Army Chief of Staff, and his aide Major Eisenhower played minor roles in the messy operation that followed.

No episode in American history has been the basis for more falsehood, much of it deliberate. The Communists did not play a leading role in setting up the camp but they organized the subsequent propaganda with great skill. There were tales of cavalry charges; of the use of tanks and poison gas; of a little boy bayonetted while trying to save his rabbit; and of tents and shelters being set on fire with people trapped inside. These were published in such works as W.W.Walters:
BEF: the Whole Story of the Bonus Army
(1933) and Jack Douglas:
Veteran on the March
(1934), both almost entirely fiction. A book of
Ballads of the BEF
appeared, including such choice items as ‘The Hoover Diet Is Gas’ and ‘I have seen the sabres gleaming as they lopped off veterans’ ears’. A characteristic Communist tract of 1940 by Bruce Minton and John Stuart,
The Fat Years and the Lean
, concluded: ‘The veterans began to leave the capital. But President Hoover would not let them disband peacefully …. Without warning he ordered the army forcibly to eject the
BEF
from Washington. The soldiers charged with fixed bayonets, firing into the crowd of unarmed men, women and children.’ While the camp was burning, it was said, Hoover and his wife, who kept the best table in White House history, dined alone in full evening dress off a seven-course meal. Some of the fictions were still being repeated in respectable works of history even in the 1970s.
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What mattered more at the time was the Administration’s inept handling of the subsequent investigation, leading to a violent and public disagreement between the Attorney-General and the Superintendant of the Washington police, which took place in the closing stages of the election campaign. Hoover, loyally supporting his cabinet colleague, was made to look a liar and a monster: ‘There was no question that the President was hopelessly defeated,’ wrote one of his staff.
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Not only was his credibility impugned, but the episode lost him the support of many of the churches, who had hitherto opposed the ‘Wet’ Roosevelt, Prohibition being the other big issue – perhaps, for most voters, the biggest issue – of the campaign.

Thus a combination of myth and alcohol, plus his own sense and image of failure, swept the Wonder Boy into oblivion in a watershed election. Reversing the huge Republican margins of the 1920s,
Roosevelt scored 22,833,000 votes to Hoover’s 15,762,000, with an electoral college majority of 472 to 59, carrying all but six states. The new voting pattern of 1932 saw the emergence of the Democratic ‘coalition of minorities’, based on the industrial north-east, which was to last for nearly half a century and turn Congress almost into a one-party legislature. The pattern had been foreshadowed by the strong showing of Al Smith, the Democratic candidate, in the 1928 presidential and, still more, in the 1930 mid-term congressional elections. But it was only in 1932 that the Republicans finally lost the progressive image they had enjoyed since Lincoln’s day and saw it triumphantly seized by their enemies, with all that such a transfer involves in the support of the media, the approval of academia, the patronage of the intelligentsia and, not least, the manufacture of historical orthodoxy.

Paradoxically, on what is now seen as the central issue of how to extricate America from Depression, there was virtually no real difference – as yet – between the parties. Both Hoover and Roosevelt were interventionists. Both were planners of a sort. Both were inflationists. It is true that Roosevelt was inclined to favour some direct relief, which Hoover still distrusted; on the other hand he was (at this stage) even more insistent than Hoover on the contradictory need for a strictly balanced budget. The actual Democratic campaign platform was strictly orthodox. Roosevelt himself was seen as an unstable lightweight in economic matters. Indeed he appeared a lightweight generally compared to his fifth cousin, Theodore. He was an aristocrat, the only child of a Hudson River squire, descended from seventeenth-century Dutch and the ‘best’ Anglo-Saxon stock; the proud owner of the magnificient Hyde Park estate half-way between New York and the state capital, Albany. He had been educated by governesses to the age of fourteen; then at Groton, the American Eton, where he acquired a slight English accent and learned Latin, Greek and European history. He had four years at Harvard, ‘on the Gold Coast’ (high-priced dormitories and clubs), developing an outlook which was, says his best biographer, ‘a mixture of political conservatism, economic orthodoxy and anti-imperialism, steeped in a fuzzy altruism and wide ignorance’ – a brew from which he was never wholly weaned.
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By 1932 Roosevelt was an experienced administrator, with over seven years in the Navy Department behind him and a moderately successful governorship of New York. But no one regarded him as a Wonder Boy. At the beginning of 1932 Lippmann described him as ‘a highly impressionable person without a firm grasp of public affairs and without very strong convictions … not the dangerous enemy of anything. He is too eager to please … no crusader… no tribune of
the people … no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.’
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Time
called him ‘a vigorous, well-intentioned gentleman of good birth and breeding’.