Roosevelt (44 page)

When Roosevelt expressed amazement that people could call him a radical, he was mainly play acting. As a politician, he knew perfectly well that this cry was an old, if somewhat soiled, practice in American politics. Yet there was an element of genuine incredulity in his reaction. He knew he had been taking some kind of middle road; more important, the hostility he felt toward Marxist doctrines, whether socialist or communist, made the charges seem ridiculous to him. This hostility was not merely ideological. It was psychological in the sense that Roosevelt distrusted the kind of doctrinaire and systematic thinking that was implicit in intellectual radicalism.

Roosevelt, in fact, was an eminently “practical” man. He had no over-all plans to remake America but a host of projects to improve this or that situation. He was a creative thinker in a “gadget” sense: immediate steps to solve specific day-to-day problems. He had ideas such as the tree shelter belt in the drought areas; transcontinental through-highways with networks of feeder roads; huge dams and irrigation systems; resettlement projects for tenant farmers; civilian conservation work in the woods; a chain of small hospitals across the country; rural electrification; regional development; bridges and houses and parks. Not surprisingly, virtually all these ideas involved building tangible things. What excited Roosevelt was not grand economic or political theory but concrete achievements that people could touch and see and use.

But all this was little known to the American people in 1935 and 1936. By some incredible process of inversion, the popular press of the day painted a picture of Roosevelt as thinker that was utterly false. Cartoons showed him as a bemused dreamer, attired in cap
and gown and attended by crackpot professors, following wild intellectual theories. Business magazines drubbed him for his “impractical” theories. It was incredible that in a country where newspapers and magazines devoted oceans of ink and forests of pulp to covering the White House, there emerged a totally reversed image of the presidential mentality.

Actually the shoe was on the other foot. It was not Roosevelt who was the impractical theorist but the businessmen themselves. In turning every question of statecraft into a question of Eternal Principle, they followed precisely the course that Roosevelt rejected.

Roosevelt saw this. He was no little exasperated with the tendency of his business friends to take refuge in abstractions. Again and again he chided them for their failure to address themselves to specific issues. When the dean of the Harvard Business School criticized the President in the New York
Sun
, Roosevelt wrote a friend sadly that he had talked with the dean for an hour once: “I put several problems up to him and he had not one single concrete answer to any of them.” In a long correspondence with Fred Kent, an economist and banker, Roosevelt took a particular delight in ignoring Kent’s generalizations and asking for specific suggestions on specific problems.

Nowhere was the contrast between the practical Roosevelt and the doctrinaire businessman better etched than in his friendly arguments with a big New York realtor. If the federal government did not provide five dollars a room for housing, Roosevelt asked this businessman, could private builders take care of families earning under a thousand dollars a year? “Housing is particularly and always has been a private matter and absolutely local,” the realtor replied. “There is nothing whatever in the Constitution or our scheme of government authorizing or indicating any Federal interest in the housing question.” He feared that the government was starting on a voyage which “I frankly must call communistic or socialistic.”

“What are we going to do with them?” Roosevelt answered. “Are we going to compel them to live under slum conditions? … Has society as a whole no obligation to these people? Or is society as a whole going to say we are licked by this problem?”

He noted that the realtor had quoted Lincoln. Another President —Cleveland—had said, “We are faced with a condition and not a theory.” Roosevelt ended: “I wish you would give me a solution.”

The President struck the same note in a press conference with editors of trade papers early in 1936. Referring to industrial leaders, he said that he was waiting for them to come and give some kind of answer. But instead of doing that, they were going around the
country saying “We have to have a balanced budget. We have to have a balanced budget.”

The President plainly wanted to answer Douglas and all the other impractical men who were chanting this account-book liturgy.

“A balanced budget isn’t putting people to work. I will balance the budget as soon as I take care of the unemployed. In other words, I am not being helped.

“Hell, I can stop relief tomorrow. What happens? Tell me that! You know. I don’t mean, by that, the policy of the owner of your paper. You know, as human beings, what happens if I stop relief tomorrow. It isn’t any joke.”

A day or two after Al Smith’s biting assault on the New Deal before the Liberty League, Roosevelt asked an aide to dig up a quotation from Lincoln that the President vaguely remembered. The passage was soon on his desk:

“I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, 10,000 angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”

R
OOSEVELT’S PRACTICAL, DAY
-to-day approach to government was even more pronounced in foreign policy making than in domestic. It was not surprising. He had burned his fingers in the election campaign of 1920 in which he and Cox had fought for adherence to the League of Nations and to the principle of collective security. Candidate Roosevelt’s ditching of the League in 1932 showed how far he would compromise with previous principles to realize immediate goals.

But even after Roosevelt was safely in office he cautiously skirted foreign policy shoals on which he feared his political popularity and his domestic program might be wrecked. His treatment of the London Economic Conference, his nationalist economic policies during 1933, his continuation of the Hoover policies on the League and on war debts seemed on their face a planned and consistent retreat from the internationalist tendencies of the Democratic party of Wilson and Cox. But they were not. For alongside these policies he fashioned measures of international co-operation that enabled him to veer back and forth between isolationism and internationalism as political conditions required.

The political climate and terrain in which the President acted did not make a foreign policy of principle any easier. To be sure, the framers of the Constitution a century and a half before had wisely given the chief executive a good deal of initiative and power in foreign policy making. But disapproval of treaties had been left in the hands of one-third plus one of the senators, and most international projects called for funds that could be denied by a majority of legislators in either House, or by a stubborn committee. Even in the executive branch he headed the President faced centrifugal forces: the cliquishness of Foreign Service officers; the narrow class loyalties of some of the “striped pants” set; the tangle of bureaucratic rivalries; and curious tie-ins between careerists in the ugly old building that housed the State Department and powerful congressmen on Capitol Hill. A host of politicians had their fingers in the foreign policy pie.

Outside Washington were the millions of voters who held the destinies of foreign policy makers in their hands. And here was the most unstable foundation of all on which to build a consistent program of foreign relations. Great numbers of these voters were colossally ignorant of affairs beyond the three-mile limit; as the old story went, they were more concerned about a dogfight in Main Street than a flare-up in distant Ruritania. Others were rigidly bound by loyalties absorbed in the countries of their national origin. Still others were prisoners of ancient fears and shibboleths: that wily foreign diplomats always played Uncle Sam for a sucker, that America had never lost a war and never won a peace conference, that salvation lay in keeping free of entangling alliances.

Yet all this was only one dimension in which Roosevelt had to shape foreign policies. For these policies by definition were influenced in turn by the political climate in foreign lands. The character of the Nazi ideology, the balance of power in the French Chamber of Deputies, the foreign policy attitudes of British labor, the silent struggle within the Kremlin, the fortunes of Chinese war lords, were all elements in the equation of world power. Reading long letters from his ambassadors, lunching with foreign envoys, quizzing his unofficial agents who had just seen MacDonald or Goering or Mussolini, leafing through lengthy studies by State Department economists, Roosevelt had to make judgments day after day on mighty imponderables imperfectly understood.

Even worse, all these forces were in ceaseless motion. An assassination in Japan, an election in France, a palace revolt in South America, a crucial cabinet session in Downing Street, the rising misery of Asiatic millions, the vast fermenting and steaming of distant ideologies—any of these could jar the unstable equilibrium of world politics. The United States was no exception. Not only was its politics plagued by the usual unpredictabilities, but the American people, lacking stable attitudes built on long experience in foreign policy making, swung fitfully from one foreign policy mood to another, from isolation to neutralism to participation in world politics.

No wonder that Roosevelt moved warily on the darkling plain of foreign policy. No wonder that he wrote a friend early in 1934, “In the present European situation I feel very much as if I were groping for a door in a blank wall. The situation may get better and enable us to give some leadership.” But what if the situation grew worse, and leadership all the more imperative?

Lacking a general principle by which to make foreign policy, Roosevelt improvised from one situation to another. The result was a jumble of separate and somewhat clashing policies. The President ranged back and forth from the old political internationalism of the Democratic party to the economic nationalism implicit in the New Deal, from the anti-imperialism of the Bryan Democrats to traditional power politics.

In veering from one policy to another Roosevelt was less concerned with fitting his policy into a larger framework than with overcoming immediate problems. In a sense he followed a middle way in foreign policy as he did in domestic. Yet again his middle way was no straight line between two ordered philosophies, but only a kind of geometric median across which Roosevelt tacked from one policy to another.

The gnawing problem of war debts hung on through the first term. Roosevelt departed little from the Hoover policies. Congress had forbidden the Executive to reduce or cancel the debts, and he made no attempt to alter this stand; but he knew too that full payment was impossible. In this impasse the President explored a variety of schemes, shifting figures around on scratch paper. All this came to naught, and Congress grew more and more testy as the nations sent token payments or no payments at all. The upshot was passage in 1934 of a bill of the belligerent old isolationist Hiram Johnson that forbade the floating of loans in this country by defaulting nations. Over objections from the State and Treasury departments Roosevelt, in a concession to congressional isolationists, signed the measure into law.

Disarmament was a sterner test of United States harmony with its old allies. The World Disarmament Conference at Geneva had been deadlocked for almost a year when Roosevelt took office, and Hitler’s seizure of power made prospects seem even more dismal. In May 1933 the President sent a personal appeal to the heads of fifty-four nations asking that they enter a nonaggression pact, eliminate offensive weapons, and sharply curb arms and armies. A few days later Roosevelt and Hull authorized Norman Davis, chairman of the United States delegation at Geneva, to go much further. If arms could be reduced, he announced, Washington would be willing not only to consult with other nations but to refrain from any action tending to defeat a collective effort against a nation breaching the peace, if we agreed with the Tightness of that effort.

If this bald announcement represented a trial balloon, it was quickly shot down by salvos from more than one quarter. Germany
was already readying orders for aircraft, and its factories were pouring out chemicals, steel, and small arms. France, fearful as ever of German
revanche
, was holding out for special guarantees. And in the ornate old room on Capitol Hill where met the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, potent senators opposed this gesture toward internationalism. The disarmament conference was soon deadlocked again.

In October Hitler announced Germany’s withdrawal from both the conference and the League. The greatest arms race in history was on.

The collapse of the conference pushed Roosevelt and Hull back into a new emphasis on naval disarmament. Japan was demanding naval parity, and Roosevelt sought to join with the British in a common stand against the looming threat in the Orient. But the British, more concerned about German than Japanese rearmament, were not easy to work with. In November 1934 an angry Roosevelt told Davis that he must constantly impress Sir John Simon, British foreign secretary, “and a few other Tories” with the “simple fact that if Great Britain is even suspected of preferring to play with Japan to playing with us, we shall be compelled, in the interest of American security, to approach public sentiment in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in a definite effort to make these Dominions understand clearly that their future security is linked with us in the United States.” He added that Davis would “best know how to inject this thought into the minds of Simon, Chamberlain, Baldwin, and MacDonald in the most diplomatic way.”

Here was an astonishing move—a threat in effect to detach the sympathies of the dominions from the mother country, and to establish with them an anti-Japanese alignment with the United States as the center stone. The effort came to naught; a week later Hull was instructing Davis on the need for an early, open, and conclusive indication of American and British alignment on naval limitation. Roosevelt’s threat was significant, however, in showing how the hard steel of power politics showed through the velvet of diplomatic relations even between two friendly nations.