The Plots Against the President (15 page)

When Roosevelt visited the camps, the workers swarmed to greet him, eager to pay their respects and express their gratitude. “At each camp Roosevelt saw a neat line of army tents set up along a company street and about two hundred tanned young men who stood at attention until an army sergeant dismissed them so they could rush up to the President's car and shake his hand,” according to one description of his tour.

“All you have to do is to look at the boys themselves to see that the camps … are a success,” Roosevelt said with satisfaction.

Chapter Twenty-six

A Balanced Civilization

The White House, like the rest of America, came to life when Franklin and Eleanor took over. The somber rooms of the Hoover occupation were now bubbling with laughter, the hallways bursting with frolicking children, and the bedchambers filled with a continuous influx of guests. Not since the previous Roosevelt presidency had the White House been such a vibrant headquarters of gaiety, banter, conviviality, and entertainment. With his mischievous sense of humor and devotion to his sacrosanct cocktail, the president himself set the tone. The staid decorum of previous administrations gave way to an informality reminiscent of the Andrew Jackson era a hundred years earlier.

The Roosevelts brought with them a lifestyle that had been honed at the governor's mansion in Albany, where Eleanor, in particular, constantly strived for a balance between private and public life. It was Eleanor who struggled to maintain a semblance of family normality, while Roosevelt relished the chaos with a more-the-merrier attitude. Both thrived on the intellectual stimulation of the ceaseless socializing, though Eleanor, as the daughter of an alcoholic, eschewed the regular evening mixers. Eleanor oversaw the cuisine, planning meals based on traditional American recipes and instilling the same frugality that restrained other Depression-era housewives. She decided it would be “highly appropriate to serve purely American dishes at the White House,” she said in her first interview. “I want to work out some meals that consist entirely of American food, prepared in the American manner, from American products.” Gone were the seven-course meals, the formal dinner attire, and the pretentious trappings of footmen and butlers that had attended the Hoover presidency. One guest of the Roosevelts reported receiving a meager dessert consisting of a slice of pineapple topped with whipped cream, two maraschino cherries, and one walnut—three nights in a row.

Roosevelt had asked his wife to cut the White House operating expenses by 25 percent, in keeping with his call for national sacrifice. She efficiently managed to fit her large family—which now included two grandchildren—into the small living quarters and to find space for other friends and employees who would be full-time residents. Marguerite “Missy” Le Hand, Roosevelt's longtime secretary, moved into the former housekeeper's quarters. Eleanor's closest friend, Lorena Hickok, who had resigned from the Associated Press when she felt her personal relationship with Eleanor clouded her objectivity, took over an upstairs bedroom. Resembling a boardinghouse more than a presidential mansion, the place was a twenty-four-hour hub of activity; one Washington traditionalist derisively described the atmosphere as being like “Saturday night at a country hotel.” Roosevelt reserved the best guest suite, where Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, to host those he was courting politically.

The president's typical sixteen-hour day involved a firmly structured routine that necessarily revolved around his infirmity. He awakened at eight thirty every morning and took breakfast in bed. After finishing his eggs, toast, and orange juice, he would settle in with five morning newspapers and a strong cup of coffee, and light the first of his forty Camel cigarettes of the day, which he would slip into a long ivory holder. Cartoonists made great hay of the affectation, the caricatured portraits depicting an insouciant Roosevelt gripping the holder between his front teeth, flashing a wide grin with his chin lifted haughtily. Once he had read all the gazettes from Washington, New York, and Baltimore, he would receive Moley and Howe and give them instructions for the day. As his valet helped him with his toilette and into his braces, his press and appointment secretaries would drop by his bedroom to get their marching orders, often conferring with him while he was shaving. His wife and children would stop by as well and chat for a few minutes as he conducted presidential business.

At ten thirty A.M. he would be wheeled to his office, where he would remain at his desk throughout the day and often into the evening, eating a light lunch of hash with one poached egg, which cost the taxpayers nineteen cents. At the beginning of his presidency, he would meet visitors at fifteen-minute intervals. His open-door policy would frequently result in overlapping appointments and an anteroom overflowing with people from all walks of life, which often flustered them but bothered him not at all. Between two and three P.M. he would dictate correspondence, sign official documents, review the letters and telegrams his secretary had culled from the thousands that arrived daily, and make telephone calls to members of Congress. From three until five he would hold cabinet meetings and twice-weekly press conferences. Several afternoons he would swim in the new White House pool, joined alternately by Eleanor, his secretaries, and children—a pastime so vital to his health that it carried a top priority in his scheduling. The celebrated cocktail hour was inviolable; he insisted on lighthearted banter, risqué jokes, and stiff martinis. Dinners were generally relaxed and unceremonious events with a mix of family, friends, journalists, and dignitaries, and they would often be followed by film screenings. He loved movies, especially the romances starring his favorite actress, the steamy and politically liberal Myrna Loy. He would then return to his office for several more hours of work and finally retire around midnight, propped up in bed and surrounded by diplomatic cables, magazines, and murder mysteries.

He leaped at the opportunities for afternoon outings when they arose, summoning the presidential yacht, the
Sequoia
, for jaunts down the Potomac to the Chesapeake Bay. But even those coveted getaways usually included an entourage of staff and advisers, ensuring that his work accompanied him. He absolutely loved being president—“Wouldn't anybody?” he asked a visitor—and ran his operation like a “one-man show.” He was surrounded by a gaggle of bright young bachelors who poured into the nation's capital to work for the dynamic new administration and who created an air of youthful exuberance. Many, like Dean Acheson, Lyndon Johnson, Abe Fortas, J. W. Fulbright, Hubert H. Humphrey, and Adlai Stevenson, would become fixtures in Washington for decades to come.

The president's accessibility was unparalleled. He had a list of a staggering one hundred people who were allowed to see him without being required to declare their business to his secretary. He referred to himself as “Frank” and called everyone by his or her first name. He accepted phone calls at all hours from common Americans throughout the country and gave specific orders that anyone who telephoned the White House with a request was to receive assistance. Such responsiveness prompted an unprecedented amount of folksy mail—450,000 letters during his first week in office—from Americans thanking him for saving their lives. One recipient of his help wrote,

Dear Mr. President: This is just to tell you that everything is all right now. The man you sent found our house all right, and we went down to the bank with him and the mortgage can go on for a while longer. You remember I wrote you about losing the furniture too. Well, your man got it back for us. I never heard of a President like you.

Those first, charmed one hundred days in the White House were exhilarating and buoyant, as Roosevelt sent measure after measure to Congress and each was met with swift passage. Understanding the powers and limitations of the presidency, the tenuousness of political goodwill, the impatience of the populace, and the unknown consequences of his ideas—not to mention that his rivals were champing at the bit—he wisely “opened the New Deal floodgates,” as one of his biographers put it, and pushed through every bit of legislation he could. During the Hundred Days, the specially convened Seventy-third Congress broke all previous records for enacting legislation, a whirlwind feat of governing and experimentation.

“No president since [Roosevelt] has faced so desperate a financial situation, and none have enjoyed such mastery of the legislative process,” biographer Jean Edward Smith wrote in the
New York Times
seventy-five years later. What Americans saw during the first three months of the Roosevelt administration was a dynamic president, unhindered by his disability, who was using the power of his office to fight tirelessly for the common man. Perhaps, as some believed, it was his physical paralysis that impelled his dynamism. In explaining his newfound admiration for Roosevelt, a friend of Herbert Hoover's told the
New York Times
, “Having overcome that [his physical disability], he is not afraid of anything. This man functions smoothly because he has learned to function in chains.” Meanwhile, those alarmed by Roosevelt's swift and effective use of executive decree compared him to Hitler and Mussolini and wrung their hands at his dictatorial action and Congress's rubber-stamping response.

The onslaught had begun on March 9, when he had sent Congress the Emergency Banking Act, which reopened the banks. Then came the Economy Act, which slashed government salaries and department budgets, saving the government nearly a billion dollars. Those were followed by the “beer bill,” which set the stage for the repeal of Prohibition; the CCC legislation, which put youths to work; and Glass-Steagall. When Congress adjourned on June 16, 1933, it had enacted all fifteen New Deal economic policies that the White House had submitted. Roosevelt had also delivered ten major speeches, held biweekly press conferences, instituted Wall Street reform, and influenced foreign policy by taking the country off the gold standard, giving the United States greater control over its dollars. Included in the innovative, momentous, and often contradictory legislation were such diverse policies as the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Home Owners Loan Act.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) introduced federal planning into yet another of the nation's major economic sectors. The most blatantly interventionist of all of his policies, the AAA created a new agency charged with raising crop prices and controlling production. Roosevelt had been moved by the plight of the farmers, who had been especially hard-hit by the Depression, and saw them as a cornerstone for rebuilding the economy. Perhaps more significantly, he sought to forestall an Iowa insurrection and impending farmer's strike that could set off explosive unrest throughout the country. He strong-armed the legislation through Congress in time for spring planting. His secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace, would oversee the production of three hundred million bushels of wheat and eight million bales of cotton, the raising of thirty million hogs, and the harvesting of 106 million acres of corn, also with a mandate of creating scarcity to drive up prices. “To destroy a standing crop goes against the soundest instincts of human nature,” Wallace said, but he was quick to blame the previous administration for the current disaster. He was equally reluctant to slaughter six million baby piglets but saw no alternative.

The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) protected home owners at a moment when more than a quarter million families had lost their homes and the foreclosure rate was a thousand per day. The government agency refinanced mortgages, provided money for taxes and repairs, lowered interest rates, and negotiated flexible repayment plans. It was designed to prevent the collapse of the national real estate market and would assume one sixth of all home mortgages in the country.

Among the measures that brought special pride to Roosevelt was the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which addressed rural poverty. Based on the belief that all Americans were entitled to affordable utilities, the TVA was designed to bring cheap electrical power to one of the country's most impoverished regions. In a feat of engineering—and a slap in the face to price-gouging utility executives—the TVA would build dams and power plants to benefit seven Southern states.

By executive order, Roosevelt created the Farm Credit Administration, merging nine federal agencies into one to provide emergency refinancing of farm mortgages for the desperate agricultural community. At his behest, Congress established the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). He placed Harry Hopkins, a New York social worker, as the head of this organization, which would deal with millions of indigent Americans. Entire families were living on less than fifty cents per day, and municipalities, states, and private charities were tapped out. The new legislation gave five hundred million dollars in unemployment-relief aid to states.

The triumphal achievement was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), a massive economic stimulus package implemented by the National Recovery Administration (NRA) that established the Public Works Administration with a $3.3 billion budget for nationwide construction projects—roads, hospitals, power plants, schools, flood control projects, bridges, sewage plants, tunnels, courthouses, U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and submarines, and fifty U.S. Army airports. The act strengthened organized labor, guaranteeing the right to bargain collectively and setting minimum wage and maximum hours standards to eliminate child labor and women's sweatshops, ushering in a new era of corporate accountability for safe and humane working conditions. The NIRA bill also provided employment for two million people. When he signed the bill into law in June 1933, Roosevelt grandly proclaimed it “a supreme effort to stabilize for all time the many factors which make for the prosperity of the Nation, and the preservation of American standards.” He believed that history would prove it to be “the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress.”

Other New Deal laws that emerged from the Roosevelt barrage included the Truth in Securities Act, which regulated stocks and bonds and put “the burden of telling the whole truth on the seller,” as Roosevelt saw it; the Railroad Coordination Act, which reorganized the railroad industry and was, in stark contrast to the other legislation, a paean to the powerful industry at the expense of the workers; and the abolition of the gold clause in public and private contracts. “Roosevelt is an explorer who has embarked on a voyage as uncertain as that of Columbus,” British statesman Winston Churchill wrote, “and upon a quest which might conceivably be as important as the discovery of the New World.”