The Genius of America (18 page)

When President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt checked in to the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., the day before his inauguration, the sign on the counter said,
DUE TO UNSETTLED BANKING CONDITIONS THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY, CHECKS ON OUT-OF TOWN BANKS CANNOT BE ACCEPTED
. Eleanor Roosevelt was concerned they would not be able to pay their bills.

Roosevelt had won against President Herbert Hoover in a landslide vote. Indeed, so strong was the vote that the Democrats had also taken control of Congress. Four years earlier, Hoover and his pro-business Republican Party had beaten the Democrats with an even larger landslide vote. But in those four years the country had come undone.

In fact Americans were in a panic, feeling both hopeless and useless. In the land of opportunity and plenty, there was little of either. “The fog of despair hung over the land,” wrote the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The economy was paralyzed. “The Country was dying by inches,” Roosevelt would later say.

The stock market crash of 1929 had just been the first symptom of the economic plague that hit the country. By 1932, many millions were unemployed, one out of every four, and many millions more were in need. Breadlines were prevalent and long, as were lines at garbage dumps, where many Americans foraged for their food. Writing in his diary in December of 1932, Rex Tugwell, a member of Roosevelt's Brain Trust, said, “No one can live and work in New York this winter without a profound sense of uneasiness. Never, in modern time, I should think, has there been so widespread unemployment and such moving distress from sheer hunger and cold.”

Banks were closed; schools were closed; factories were closed; offices were closed. And the ties that connected the society were unwinding. In a famous incident General Douglas MacArthur had used the army, with bayonets and tear gas, to rout thousands of unemployed World War I veterans, the “bonus army,” who with their families had come to Washington to lobby Congress for the earlier payment of a promised future bonus. The nationally syndicated columnist Thomas L. Stokes expressed his despair: “The United States Army turned on American citizens—just fellows like myself down on their luck, dispirited, hopeless.”

Through most of the country's history, the Constitution's promise of liberty had been closely intertwined with the promise of economic success. But now that success was in tatters. The American dream was becoming a nightmare. And from this nightmare a constitutional crisis was growing. According to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The American experiment in self-government was now facing what was, excepting the Civil War, its greatest test.”

For example, reminiscent of Shays's Rebellion, farmers in many parts of the country were turning to violence to stop the shipment of produce to market. Their hope was that a reduction of supply would raise prices that were well below what it was costing to produce the crops. Others wanted help from their state legislatures. “If we don't get beneficial service from the Legislature, 200,000 of us are coming to Lincoln [Nebraska] and we'll tear that new State Capitol to pieces,” a southern planter told the Senate. “Unless something is done for the American farmer we will have revolution in the countryside within less than twelve months.”

Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr. saw the nation's economic chaos as an emerging threat to the Constitution. He warned his colleagues in the House of Representatives in 1932, “If we don't give [security] under the existing system, the people will change the system.” Even moral leaders seemed to despair. They wondered whether the nation's elite, who even during the economic crisis remained rich and powerful, would give up some power for reform of the system. “There is nothing in history to support the thesis that a dominant class ever yields its position or its privileges in society because its rule has been convicted of ineptness or injustices,” lamented the important American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

Some Americans were beginning to think, and say, that America's constitutional democracy could no longer work. They worried that our constitutional form of government could not bring either order or change to the country. Much in the way that members of the Constitutional Convention bruited about restoring a king, there were those who talked about undoing the Constitution. As Washington had worried back then, talking can proceed to doing.

The influential journalist Henry Hazlitt suggested replacing Congress with a “directorate of twelve men.” Others proposed an even more draconian and direct response, vesting a leader “with dictatorial powers.” “I don't often envy other countries their governments,” said Republican senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, “but if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now.” The magazine
Barron's
called for a “genial and lighthearted dictator.” Walter Lippmann, perhaps the country's most influential journalist, advised Roosevelt: “The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.”

Several times in Americans history the country has faced a crisis with two roads out. One road was to strengthen the democratic system to preserve it. The other road was to abandon a democratic union because other goals seemed more urgent. This was exactly the choice the framers faced when they invented the more powerful central government under the Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation. It was the choice Lincoln faced when he decided the Union would be preserved at gunpoint. Now it was Franklin D. Roosevelt's choice.

In his First Inaugural Address, Roosevelt asked a desperate country to be patient with the Constitution. Action was needed, he said, but such action was “feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors.” With one hundred thousand before him around the Capitol steps and millions gathered around their radios, Roosevelt reassured the country that even the “extraordinary needs” of the nation had been met in the past, and could be met now, “by changes in emphasis and arrangement” in the Constitution “without loss of essential form. That is why our Constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.”

T
HE
S
CARY
T
HOUGHT OF
A
S
TRONGER
G
OVERNMENT

President Roosevelt, as former New York governor Mario Cuomo used to say, rose from his wheelchair to lift a nation from its knees. The fact that he needed to use a portion of his First Inaugural Address to reaffirm the value of the Constitution captures how perilous a political moment this was. Part of the purpose of Roosevelt's embrace of the Constitution was to send a message of reassurance that he was not seeking to become a dictator. But he was also entering a second debate going on at that time, in many ways even more interesting in the context of our story about the country's relationship to the Constitution. It was a reprise of the debate between 1776 and 1787.

Roosevelt didn't want dictatorial powers, certainly not permanently. But he did want to vastly expand the reach and authority of the federal government to address the emergency. To some Americans, that was profoundly scary, and it revived the debate over limits to federal power that tore at the country between 1776 and 1787. Did America need a stronger national government to solve its problems? Or would relying on the public virtue of the people be enough?

Across the political divide from Roosevelt were Americans who agreed the crisis of economic collapse had to be addressed. But like Tom Paine and Patrick Henry in the revolutionary era, they saw concentrating power in the federal government as a needless threat to personal liberty even in—no, especially in—a time of crisis.

This strain of thinking was summed up by Herbert Hoover, who was president when the markets crashed: “You cannot extend the mastery of government over the daily life of a people without somewhere making it master of people's souls and thoughts.” These thoughts echoed those Patrick Henry had expressed in his great speech to the Virginia convention, where he pleaded with Americans to think about liberty before economic growth and prosperity.

There were those after the crash who fought federal intervention. “Stick it out,” thought many conservatives and, of course, many who would be unfavorably affected by regulation. Anything else, they would argue, would “overburden the shoulders of government and industry” and push the country “towards the Socialistic goal, the abolition of private property.” Like the plague it was, they argued, the bad time would pass. And when it did, American freedom would still be protected.

President Hoover believed the federal government had an important role. Were it not for the market crash, poor Herbert Hoover might be well remembered. He was a pragmatic figure and a truly excellent manager. He was a hero of the relief efforts after World War I. He was a supporter of business but an enlightened one. In the practices of banks and other financial institutions, he saw predatory self-interest without regard for the common good of the nation. But like the revolutionary leaders of 1776, and unlike the framers of the Constitution, Hoover believed in a uniquely American form of public virtue, through which Americans could restrain self-interest for the common good. Government's job was “to articulate and organize the aspiration of these better selves and to provide the information for them to come together.” Government should forge volunteerism to meet the Depression crisis. Anything else would result in “tyranny and the corruption of America's unique political soul.”

But Roosevelt, like Madison, found a reliance on virtue inadequate to the crisis. Like the framers, he viewed America in chaos. Unchecked, this chaos would slide toward despotism. A reliance on virtue would not be enough. States, as they had been in the years leading up to the ratification of the Constitution, were again seen as the culprits. “To the New Dealers, the states were weak and ineffectual, unable to protect rights or deal with serious social problems.” Often they were dominated by “well organized private groups.” Domination in this case was not that of majority factions controlling the political process, but of what Roosevelt would later call “a new despotism,” a “new industrial dictatorship” protected by government. “A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor, other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.”

To respond, Roosevelt introduced a new definition of liberty and with it a radical new role for the federal government. The protection of Americans' liberty required the “opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.” For Americans to have that opportunity, the federal government would now be intimately and immediately involved with the lives of its citizens and strongly led by the president. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” FDR maintained. “The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.”

T
HE
N
EW
P
RESIDENCY
, V
IGOROUS
A
CTION AND
C
ONSENSUS

In common, Americans wanted “vigorous action” from their government. They wanted their president to fix things. This role for the president was new for America. Long seen as focused on foreign affairs or war, the role of the president had been limited in domestic affairs. There was relatively little to do there, and Congress dominated the efforts. But this was a matter of history, not law.

Although the framers properly worried about the determination of an executive to aggregate power (as they worried about that inevitable tendency in every official), they limited the executive's capacity to achieve such through both separation of powers and, ultimately, the electoral process. But nothing in the Constitution constrained the president from aggressively asserting himself into domestic policy making. A forceful president was possible from the beginning of the Republic. “Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government,” wrote Hamilton, and most of the founders no doubt agreed. As President Woodrow Wilson had rightly observed, “the President [was] at liberty both in law and conscience to be as big a man as he can.”

In fact, the Constitution provides opportunities for a president who wants to be, in Wilson's words, a “big man.” The design of Congress tends toward policy-making “inertia,” as the representatives of multitudes of different interests argue over their relative values. For the legislative ball to roll, it usually needs a big push, which the president is well positioned to give.

The president is the voice of the nation, an increasingly important notion as that voice became magnified by broadcasting. He (with the vice president) is the only official who is elected by all Americans. Each year the president is constitutionally obligated to report to the nation on the state of the Union, and thus only the president is officially charged with measuring and reporting on the nation's needs. And through the veto power, he also can stop legislation he judges unsatisfactory.

These powers, in the context of the Depression and later World War II, allowed FDR to become the domestically forceful president he was. And his successes would not be lost on future candidates. From that moment on, candidates for president would campaign as domestic leaders, who, if elected, would make the everyday lives of Americans better. The job now included setting and pursuing a national agenda for Americans and their Congress to consider. The task also included managing a vast government, created by these new programs, which intersected everywhere with the lives of its citizens.