Roosevelt (34 page)

Roosevelt was not above back-alley horse trades. In the spring of 1934 Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina pigeonholed the Chief Executive’s nomination of Tugwell as Under Secretary of Agriculture. But Smith also badly wanted a United States marshal-ship for a henchman who had a good reputation except for a slight case of homicide. So Roosevelt made the deal, and greeted an astonished Tugwell with the cheery remark: “You will never know any more about it, I hope; but today I traded you for a couple of murderers!”

Roosevelt often fell back on his own charm and resourcefulness in dealing with congressmen. Ickes watched in admiration one day as the President handled a ticklish problem of patronage. Senate Majority Leader Robinson was insisting on the appointment as commissioner of Indian affairs of a man whom Ickes felt to be totally disqualified. When an ugly row seemed in the offing, the President had the two antagonists to tea. First he established a friendly atmosphere by discussing with Robinson a number of pending bills that the President and Senator both favored. Then he let Robinson and Ickes briefly make their cases about the appointment. Before an argument could develop, the President turned the subject back to general policies. When dinner was announced, Roosevelt said pleasantly to Robinson, “Well, Joe, you see what I am up against.…” Robinson replied that there was nothing further he could say, and left. Even so, the President waited a day or two, and then sent in the name of another man.

Roosevelt was a genius at placating his bickering lieutenants. Ickes was a chronic grumbler, staying after cabinet sessions to pour out his troubles. Sometimes harassed officials, feeling that their chief had forgotten them, used the threat of resigning as a means of getting their way—or, at the least, of getting attention from the White House. The President bore these pinpricks with marvelous good humor. But he knew how to teach a lesson too. Once when he heard that an important administrator was about to resign he
telephoned him: “I have just had some bad news, Don. Secretary Hull is threatening to resign. He is very angry because I don’t agree with him that we ought to remove the Ambassador to Kamchatka and make him third secretary to the Embassy at Svodia.” Quickly catching on, the official agreed that his threat to resign was very foolish indeed.

Roosevelt’s way with the press also showed his mastery of the art of government. He made so much news and maintained such a friendly attitude toward the newspapermen covering the White House that he quickly and easily won their sympathy. The newspapermen were especially pleased that the President had reinstituted the press conference, thus enabling them to question him directly. No one knew better than Roosevelt, however, that the press conference was a two-edged sword: he could use it to gain a better press, but the reporters could also use it to trip him. Much depended on knowing when
not
to answer a question.

One day, while instructing his agency chiefs on public relations, Roosevelt told them how he had handled an awkward query. A reporter had asked him to comment on a statement by Ambassador Bingham in London urging closer relations between the United States and Britain. If he had done the natural thing of backing up Bingham, the newspapers would have made headlines of the President’s statement, with likely ill effect on naval conversations then under way with Japan. If he had said “no comment,” he would have sounded critical of Bingham’s statement. So he simply said he had not seen it—although in fact he had.

Roosevelt used his most tactical weapons for dealing with Congress. “The coming session will be comparatively easy to handle,” Roosevelt wrote to Colonel House in December 1933, “though it may not be noiseless.” The President did not make the near-perfect score in this session that he had the year before, but he got through most of his program and staved off bills he disliked. To Hull’s infinite satisfaction Congress passed the Reciprocal Tariff Act as an emergency measure to stimulate foreign trade without disturbing any “sound” or “important” American interest, as the President put it. The Gold Reserve Act was passed in virtually the form Roosevelt had asked; he hailed it as a decisive step by which the government took firmly in its own hands control of the gold value of the dollar. Farm benefits were extended to growers of cotton, tobacco, and other commodities. The President’s requests for stock exchange regulation and for two billions in bonds for refinancing farm mortgages were converted into legislation.

IT LOOKS AS THOUGH AT LAST WE MIGHT HAVE A VAMP-PROOF PRESIDENT, June 6, 1933, John T. McCutcheon, Chicago
Tribune

WASHING BEHIND THE EARS WON’T BE ENOUGH, March 26, 1933, Tom Carlisle, Washington
Star

On other issues, however, the outcome was different. Roosevelt had to negotiate with the silver bloc for weeks before reaching a bargain under which the Treasury would purchase heavy amounts of silver and thus shore up the domestic silver market. On a clear-cut sectional issue, the St. Lawrence Waterway Treaty, the President met defeat, with Democratic senators from states supposedly hurt by the waterway voting against the treaty and killing it. And both chambers by sweeping majorities overrode a presidential veto of an appropriations bill that would have restored part of Roosevelt’s pay cut for government employees.

When Congress could not interfere, Roosevelt acted with decision. Constitutionally the President had exclusive power to grant or withhold recognition of foreign governments. On November 17, 1933, Roosevelt announced the resumption of diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. This action came after lengthy haggling over terms. Moscow promised to refrain from abetting revolutionary activity against the American political or social order, and to protect the right of free religious worship of Americans in Russia. Rosy plans were laid for expansion of trade between the two nations. Although some of the President’s friends (and his mother) opposed recognition, the action seemed to be well received by most Americans, including many businessmen and Republicans.

Many measures passed by Congress granted sweeping powers to the President. By the close of the Seventy-third Congress he held unprecedented controls over a peacetime American economy. Yet Roosevelt did not seek all the power he got. In several instances Congress granted him wide discretion, simply because the factions
on Capitol Hill split wide open on thorny political matters and could agree only on leaving final decision with the White House. This was true of farm relief, the NRA, and the tariff. Power, it is said, goes to the power-seeking, but in these cases it was also the temper of the times and the divisions in Congress that enlarged presidential power.

The Roosevelt technique with Congress dazzled the country; but there were misgivings. One of those who was not enchanted was a keen student of national politics at Harvard named E. Pendleton Herring. Analyzing the first two sessions of Roosevelt’s Congress, Herring noted the extent to which presidential control had rested on unsteady bases such as patronage, government funds and favors, the co-operation of congressional leaders, and the crisis psychology of the people. Even so, Herring noted, the administration could do little more than “keep order in the bread-line that reached into the Treasury.” The more powerfully organized groups got much of what they wanted; the weaker groups, such as labor and consumers, did not do so well. The President had shown himself as an astute politician rather than a crusader. Responsible executive leadership seemed weak in the face of organized minorities.

“Can the presidential system,” asked Herring, “continue as a game of touch and go between the Chief Executive and congressional
blocs
played by procedural dodges and with bread and circuses for forfeits?”

It was a good question—but the American people in 1933 and 1934 were more concerned with “bread and circuses” than with academic anxieties.

If the New Deal had circus-like qualities during the first years, the center ring was occupied by the National Recovery Administration, and the ringmaster presented a fresh new visage on the American scene. General Hugh S. Johnson looked like the old cavalry man that he was; he had a hard, leathery face, squint eyes, and a rough bark of a voice, but underneath, curious qualities crowded one another: he was a sentimentalist, an old hand with businessmen and business ways, a West Pointer, and as mercurial and picturesque as a sideshow barker. Although Johnson’s long-time boss Bernard Baruch rated him as only a “good No. 2 man,” the general impressed the President enough to win the job of running the biggest experiment in peacetime governmental control of the economy that America had ever seen.

Johnson’s main task was to induce businessmen to draw up codes of fair competition, which on the President’s approval had the full
force of law. Administered under the general’s supervision by a code authority in each industry, the codes were supposed to stop wasteful competition, to bring about more orderly pricing and selling policies, and to establish higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions for workers. Antitrust policies would be softened so that businessmen could co-operate in setting up the codes. Johnson had expected to administer the vast public works section of the bill too, but at the last minute Roosevelt put this under Ickes. So furious was the general that he threatened to quit the whole business then and there; the President asked Miss Perkins to “stick with Hugh and keep him sweet,” which she did by driving him for hours around Washington until he mastered himself and promised to go on with his part of the job.

And a job it was. Within weeks the NRA burst on the American people like a national call to arms. The NRA eagle was suddenly in every shop window, on magazine covers, in the movies, on girls in chorus lines. Rushing from city to city in an army plane, issuing pronunciamentos at every stop, Johnson orated, politicked, wisecracked, coaxed businessmen into signing codes drawn up by industry representatives hurriedly collected in Washington. The general became the symbol of recovery; for hours he reviewed a climactic parade up Fifth Avenue, trying desperately to greet the endless river of humanity without appearing to give the despised Mussolini salute. Not since 1917 had the whole nation savored such a throbbing sense of unity, of marching together.

But marching where? Almost at the start the President had virtually lost control of the NRA. He told the cabinet one day how Johnson, coattails standing out behind, had rushed into his office, and handed the President three codes to sign. As Roosevelt was signing the last one, Johnson looked at his watch, said he had five minutes to catch his plane, and dashed out, the codes in his pocket. “He hasn’t been seen since,” Roosevelt added brightly. The President was hardly more than a front man in whose name an elaborate re-employment agreement was arranged and a thousand other actions taken. Johnson himself had to delegate huge policy-making powers to hastily summoned businessmen who might or might not be representative of the myriad interests in their industries. And in the first flush of enthusiasm the NRA coverage was extended so far that the machinery was nearly swamped. An extreme case was the St. Louis bootblack who signed the re-employment agreement, cut his hours to forty a week, and promptly asked the NRA to make up his pay.

The NRA was essentially an expression of the broker state—that is, of the government acting for, and mediating among, the major interest groups. The NRA was the institutional expression of
Roosevelt’s plan for a partnership of all groups, achieved through friendly co-operation between the government and group leaders. But who were the leaders? It was not surprising that in the haste and confusion Johnson dealt with the business and labor leaders closest at hand, those who were most vocal, best organized, most experienced in dealing with politicians and bureaucrats. Who could speak for that amorphous group, the consumers? A Consumers’ Advisory Board was set up but was eased to one side; a member quit indignantly within a few weeks of its establishment.

By the end of 1933 the NRA eagle was fluttering through heavy weather. “N.R.A. is the worst law ever passed,” some disillusioned Cleveland grocers wired the President. “N.R.A. means National Run Around,” read a labor placard hoisted by a Baltimore picket line. Protests rose in Congress. William Connery, chairman of the House Labor Committee, asked Roosevelt to tell Johnson to work with “true representatives” of labor. Roosevelt answered patiently that as one “a great deal older than you” he advised the Congressman not to overstate his case. “Most of us who consider ourselves liberals have the same ultimate objective in view.…” But the President could not ignore the protests. In March 1934 he appointed a review board under the old reformer and defense attorney Clarence Darrow, which soon was reporting that the codes had allowed the more powerful interests to seize control or extend their control of industries. Roosevelt trimmed NRA’s powers, limited its jurisdiction, eased Johnson out, and put a more domesticated chief, Donald Richberg, in his place. But by the time the Supreme Court administered the
coup de grâce
shortly before NRA’s second birthday, it was near administrative and political collapse.