Roosevelt (40 page)

By compromising with the liberal-labor bloc the administration was finally able to stave off crippling amendments and push the bill through. Passage was due less to Roosevelt—who was cruising on the
Nourmahal
during the latter stages and complaining that the Senate was a “headache” and the whole situation “too childish for grownups”—than to administration leaders on the Hill and to the legislators’ willingness to compromise on certain issues by leaving them to the President. Roosevelt had to accept some losses: most notably a provision requiring senatorial confirmation for employees under the measure who earned more than $5,000 a year.

By early April when the relief bill passed, Roosevelt had only this victory in three months. He had appealed to the Senate to ratify United States adherence to the World Court, but the effort
had failed amid a deluge of hostile telegrams, many of them stirred up by Coughlin. His social security bill, which would commit the nation to a program of assisting the jobless and the poor through federal and state action, was floundering between the same forces that had almost ground the relief bill to death: the liberals were sorely disappointed by its limited coverage and by the reliance it put on state participation; the conservatives thought it went too far. A veterans’ bonus bill had passed the House with more than enough votes to override the expected presidential veto.

Never had Roosevelt been so squeezed among opposing political forces as during the spring of 1935. Spokesmen of the United States Chamber of Commerce sharply attacked the administration. Meeting with the President in mid-May, progressive senators La Follette, Wheeler, Norris, and Johnson, backed up by Ickes and Wallace, urged him to assert the leadership that the country, they said, was demanding. Roosevelt’s old adviser Felix Frankfurter reported that Justice Louis Brandeis had sent word that it was the eleventh hour. La Follette reminded the President that Theodore Roosevelt had taken open issue with members of his own party.

Roosevelt indicated to the progressives that he would take a firmer stand. But despite the pressure from left and right, and from the agitators of discontent, he was not yet ready to jettison the middle way. He was still pinning his hopes on an extension of NRA for two years. The NRA was not Little Orphan Annie, he told reporters, but “a very live young lady” and he expected the two-year extension to go through.

Then, late in May, came the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court invalidating the NRA, mainly on the grounds that Congress had exercised power beyond the scope of the interstate commerce clause and had delegated too much of this power outside its own reach. It was a jolting blow to the heart of Roosevelt’s middle way.

For four days the President was silent, while the country waited expectantly. Then, on May 31, he gave his answer in a carefully staged performance. As the reporters trooped up to his desk, they saw an open copy of the high court’s opinion on one side, and on the other a dozen or more telegrams. Eleanor Roosevelt was there, knitting on a blue sock. The President leaned back in his chair, lighted a cigarette, jestingly asked, as he so often did, whether the reporters had any news. Did he care to comment on the NRA? a reporter asked.

“Well, Steve, if you insist. That’s an awful thing to put up to a fellow at this hour of the morning just out of bed.” But the President was eager to talk. And talk he did, for almost an hour and a half.

His monologue was not that of a liberal outraged by a tory court.
It was a long dissenting opinion by a man who had been following a moderate course helping and mediating among businessmen, workers, and farmers alike, and now to his surprise finds the props knocked from under him. One by one he quoted from the pile of telegrams. These “pathetic appeals,” as he called them, came not from unemployed workers or from desperate farmers but from businessmen—drugstore proprietors in Indiana, a candy seller in Massachusetts, a Georgia businessman, a large department store owner, a cigar store operator. Pushing the telegrams aside, the President paused dramatically. What were the implications of the decision? It simply made impossible national action, collective action, the great partnership. Clearly he was attacking the decision not because it was conservative or antilabor but because it thwarted action by the national government to help all groups, including business.

Again and again the President insisted it was not a partisan issue. Where to go next? “Don’t call it right or left; that is just first-year high school language, just about. It is not right or left.…” Then he slashed at the Court again. A “horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce.” And he let the reporters quote that phrase.
FDR—‘HORSE-AND-BUGGY DECISION’
shouted next day from front pages across the nation. Most people took this remark figuratively as a New Dealer’s attack on conservative judges. Actually Roosevelt was speaking literally—he was dissenting with judges who thought that national problems could be solved by forty-eight separate states. Pressed by reporters as to how he would cope with the effect of the decision, the President said, “We haven’t got to that, yet.”

Then began the second Hundred Days.

Congress, which had been idling for weeks and had come to a standstill after the court decision, was galvanized into action. Roosevelt threw himself into the legislative battle. No longer was he squeamish about putting the lash to congressional flanks. Now he was bluntly telling congressional leaders that certain bills
must
be passed. Administration contact men ranged amid the legislative rank and file, applying pressure. Late in the afternoon they would report back to the President. When they mentioned a balking congressman, the big hand would move instantly to the telephone; in a few moments the President would have the congressman on the wire, coaxing him, commanding him, negotiating with him. To scores of others Roosevelt dictated one- or two-sentence chits asking for action. He and his lieutenants, working late into the night, acting in close concert with friendly leaders on Capitol Hill, stayed one or two jumps ahead of the divided opposition. Congressmen
complained, balked, dragged their heels, but in the end they acted.

The Wagner Labor Relations Act went through with a rush before the end of June, and the President signed it enthusiastically. The Social Security Act was passed, also by heavy majorities. Banking and Tennessee Valley legislation were strengthened. The AAA was modified in an attempt to protect it against judicial veto. The holding company bill, which was designed to curb the power of giant utility holding companies over their operating subsidiaries, and which Roosevelt had been urging since January, went through under intensified administration pressure. And a controversial tax bill became law despite intense opposition from business and grumbling among congressmen that the President was pushing them too hard.

Nothing better showed Roosevelt’s sudden change of direction than the tax bill. He had said nothing about such a measure in his January message; his budget message had suggested that no new taxes would be needed. He had toyed with a “share-the-wealth” scheme of the Treasury’s in February, but as late as May 22 he seemed to be sticking to his January position. Unexpectedly on June 19 the President asked Congress for an inheritance tax as well as the estate tax, gift taxes to balk evasion of the inheritance tax, stepped-up income taxes on “very great individual incomes,” and a corporation income tax graduated according to the size of corporations, with a dividend tax to prevent evasion. Leaving Congress “tired, sick, and sore, and in confusion,” as one Senator said, the President then departed for the Yale-Harvard boat races.

What had happened? Had the President turned left?

Viewed in retrospect, Roosevelt’s course seemed to many a sudden and massive shift leftward, away from the
via media
of the first two years to a commanding position on the left. From such a view it was an easy step to the further assumption that Roosevelt had shifted left to meet the rising hurricanes among labor, farmers, Long, Coughlin, Townsend & Co. The trouble with this theory is that it does not fit the way Roosevelt actually behaved. His reaction to the hurricanes set off by agitators of discontent was to outmaneuver the leaders and to give way a bit to the blast, not to steal the ideological thunder of the left. He did not exploit the potentialities of encouraging and allying himself with the new millions of labor.

What did happen was the convergence of a number of trends and episodes at a crucial point—June 1935—that left Roosevelt in the posture of a radical. The Supreme Court demolished the main institutional apparatus of the middle way by invalidating NRA. In filling this void, Roosevelt salvaged 7a (in the form of the Wagner Act) and other NRA provisions that had been concessions
to the left. The Court’s decision made impossible the resurrection of the code features that had been the NRA’s attraction for certain business and industrial groups. The result of this situation was that merely carrying on prolabor elements of the NRA meant a leftward shift.

This was one reason for Roosevelt’s new posture; another was the practical effect of dealing with Congress. Following a middle way between the progressive and conservative factions had not been as easy in 1935 as it had been earlier. For one thing, Congress had shifted leftward in interest and ideology after the November 1934 election. In the early months of 1935 Roosevelt’s program had been bombarded from right and left, and narrowly escaped destruction. The exigencies of congressional politics pulled him to a more liberal program, and it was significant that his new position, harmonizing more smoothly with the majority in Congress on the left, resulted in an even more important array of measures than those of the first Hundred Days.

APPLYING THE PRESSURE, May 1, 1935, C. H. Sykes, Philadelphia
Public Ledger

But the main reason for the new posture was the cumulative impact of the attacks from the right. He had been following a
middle way; “as he looked back on it all,” recalled Moley, who was watching him closely during this period, “he was, like Clive, amazed at his own moderation.” The undercover attacks of business, the criticism that filled most of the press, the open desertion of big businessmen as symbolized in the Liberty League and smaller businessmen as represented in the Chamber of Commerce, the drifting away of conservative advisers like Moley—all these played their part. The desertion of the right, especially in the NRA decision, automatically helped shift Roosevelt to the left.

The theory that Roosevelt executed a swing left for ideological reasons as a result only of the NRA decision runs hard up against other strands of Roosevelt’s development. His program had always embraced liberal measures as well as orthodox ones. Social security had long been in the works—Roosevelt in 1930 had been the first leading politician to advocate unemployment insurance—and it was put off to 1935 mainly because of administrative and drafting difficulties. The President urged the holding company bill throughout the session. He lined up for the Wagner Act before the NRA decision was announced. The speech he planned to give if the Supreme Court ruled against the abrogation of the Gold Clause would, except for the Court’s 5-4 majority for the government, have precipitated a grave constitutional crisis in February 1935.

Roosevelt, in short, made no consciously planned, grandly executed deployment to the left. He was like the general of a guerrilla army whose columns, fighting blindly in the mountains through dense ravines and thickets, suddenly converge, half by plan and half by coincidence, and debouch into the plain below.

That Roosevelt had made no final ideological commitment to the left was made clear in an exchange of letters between the President and newspaper publisher Roy Howard shortly after Congress adjourned. Certain elements of business, Howard warned, had been growing more hostile to the administration, and considered the tax bill an attempt at revenge on business. They hoped for a breathing spell for industry, a recess from further experimentation. In a cordial response Roosevelt defended the tax measure and spoke for a “wise balance” in the economy. But, he added, the administration’s basic program had now reached substantial completion. The “breathing-spell” was here—“very decidedly so.” The zig had been followed by another zag.

Possibly Roosevelt really meant what he wrote to Howard. But events have ways of committing leaders to new positions. The great legislative victories of 1935 had unloosed forces that were to carry Roosevelt further from the middle way toward partisanship and party leadership. The second Hundred Days pointed the way toward the triumph of 1936—and toward the defeats that lay beyond.

T
HE PRESIDENT HIMSELF SEEMED
to take a breathing spell during the latter weeks of 1935. Exulting over the “grand and glorious” congressional session, he left Washington in September for a train trip across the country, with a stop for the politician’s happy task of dedicating Boulder Dam. A “million eager people” had received him in Los Angeles, he wrote his mother. At San Diego he gave an address on the menacing clouds of “malice domestic and fierce foreign war,” and again he sounded the theme of social co-operation and concord. Then, with Ickes and Hopkins in tow, he boarded the cruiser
Houston
for a leisurely cruise south through the Panama Canal, and north to Charleston.