The Plots Against the President (24 page)

 

During the Great Depression, with unemployment rising to sixteen million, hundreds of thousands of Americans—like this migrant worker on a California highway—wandered the country in search of jobs.

 

The ingenious Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was Roosevelt's own idea and pet project to combine conservation with full employment. Roosevelt's “Tree Army” was designed to get the destitute and troublesome young men of the cities to work in the national forests. These men working in Idaho were among the quarter million called into public service.

Acknowledgments

Every writer about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal finds an abundance of material from scholars and journalists who have mined the public record. Unfortunately, few have explored the two events that I chose to examine, which I think are crucial to understanding Roosevelt's first term. The works that I found particularly brilliant and insightful about Roosevelt's rise, the first hundred days, and the New Deal are the biographies written by Kenneth S. Davis, Frank Freidel, William E. Leuchtenberg, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Alan Brinkley's
Voices of Protest
was a valuable resource on Huey Long and Father Coughlin, and George Wolfskill's work on political extremism in America was enlightening, if a bit frightening.

Very little has been written about Giuseppe Zangara and his attempted assassination of Roosevelt, or about the thwarted Fascist coup d'état. Both incidents were further obscured by the fact that case files have been destroyed and vital documents either have been redacted or are missing altogether. Because both the assassination and coup attempts are surrounded in mystery and controversy, I chose to rely on the few primary sources available and selected my secondary sources very carefully. For the assassination attempt and Zangara's background and anti-Fascist, anti-capitalist political motivation, I depended on contemporaneous news accounts, investigative files from the FBI (which I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act), and Zangara's jailhouse memoir (reprinted in Blaise Picchi's admirable account:
The Five Weeks of Giuseppe Zangara
). For the “Business Plot”—whose trail was even murkier than Zangara's—I again sought the contemporaneous record, especially the hearings and findings of the House committee investigation. Also useful were Smedley Butler's autobiography (as told to Thomas Lowell); Paul Comly French's story about the plot, “$3,000,000 Bid for Fascist Army Bared”; the FBI files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, including J. Edgar Hoover's personal memoranda; and Jules Archer's
The Plot to Seize the White House
.

I am grateful beyond words to the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars for my research fellowship there. I am not exaggerating when I say that this book could not have been written without the extraordinary support of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Writing is a profoundly solitary venture, especially when done in the hinterland and without academic affiliation. So the community of scholars that welcomed me in Washington, D.C., breathed new life into my research and writing. Deep thanks to Lee Hamilton, Michael van Dusen, Lucy Jilka, Sonya Michel, Lindsay Collins, Kimberly Conner, Janet Spikes, and Dagne Gizaw. Sheldon Garon was helpful in my understanding of the Fascist impulse in 1930s America. Jamie Stiehm made my time at the center socially, as well as intellectually, rich. I especially want to thank my intern, Lennon Wetovsky, whose research and retrieval of key documents alleviated my workload immensely.

A media fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University also contributed greatly to my initial research on the subject. The Hoover Library is where I found Raymond Moley's notes from his interview with Giuseppe Zangara, as well as Moley's recollections of the attempted assassination. Many thanks to David Brady and Mandy MacCalla for making that possible.

The U.S. Secret Service failed to respond to repeated Freedom of Information requests regarding both the assassination and coup attempts, which was especially disappointing since it was the lead agency charged with both investigations. Meanwhile, the FBI was extraordinarily cooperative, and I would like to thank Curt Cromer for the alacrity with which that agency's files were culled, analyzed, and released.

To my colleagues whose ideas and perceptions informed so much of what is good in this book, I thank you: Scott Armstrong, Sidney Blumenthal, Phil Cook, Kirk Ellis, Bonnie Goldstein, Jim Grady, Mike Green, Ed Grosvenor, Dennis McBride, Virginia Scharff, and Ron Steel.

I am always appreciative of Mark Adams and Peggy Trujillo at the New Mexico State Library, who make it possible for me to live and write in one of the most beautiful places on the planet.

Once again I want to thank Gloria Loomis, my agent and dear, dear friend, who is my unflagging champion. At Bloomsbury Press, Peter Ginna has been everything one wants in an editor: informed, engaged, encouraging, and trusting. Pete Beatty and Nathaniel Knaebel smoothly ushered the book through the production process.

As I finish this—my seventh book—I am yet again overcome with gratitude toward those men, women, and children in my life who make it all possible. The usual suspects are here again, in rare and impeccable form: my New Mexico, Washington, and Nevada girlfriends, my hiking buddies, my martini mates, my parents, and my three sons. Everyone deserves superlatives this time around, as we all rose to meet the material and the majesty of the drama of 1933 America: Charmay Allred, Shaune Bazner, Sandy Blakeslee, Jan Brooks, Maxine Champion, Nancy Cook, Frankie Sue Del Papa, Dan Flores, Felice Gonzales, Joanna Hurley, Judy Illes, Mike and Terri Jerry, Don and Jean Lamm, Caroline Monaco, Carl Moore, Lucy Moore, Jim and Julie Anne Overton, Marla Painter, Nora Pouillon, Ellen Reiben, Bob Samuel, Gail Sawyer, Patty Smart, Phil Smith, and Greg and Barbara Wierzynski.

Finally, to Sara and Ralph Denton, and to Ralph, Grant, and Carson Samuel—my heart runneth over.

Notes

Prologue: A Beleaguered Capital

    1 “that which might be found”:
New York Times
, March 5, 1933.

    2 count on a benevolent dictator: Freidel, 205.

    2 “We could have had a dictator”: General Hugh S. Johnson, quoted in Wolfskill and Hudson, 80.

    2 “When millions”: Leuchtenburg, 21.

Chapter One: Lofty Aspirations

    5 “a splendid large baby boy”: Schlesinger, 1:319.

    5 “brought his young bride”: Ibid., 318.

    6 “little Greek democracy of the elite”: Hofstadter, 415.

    6 “left out”: Eleanor Roosevelt, quoted in Schlesinger, 1:322.

    6 “character building”: Black, 22.

    7 “after all”: Sara Roosevelt, quoted in Hofstadter, 416.

    7 “Granny:” Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, 95.

    7 “an angel”: Geoffrey C. Ward, 314.

    8 “I am plain”: Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, 95.

    8 “In all countries”: James Roosevelt, quoted in Cook, 1:145.

8–9 “fancy dancing” … “deeply moved”: Ibid., 135–36.

    9 “From the ruins”: Roosevelt, quoted in Hofstadter, 417.

    9 “lair of predators”: Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, 159.

    9 “The conservation battle”: Schlesinger, 1:336.

Chapter Two: Rebuild His Broken Body

  10 “gnomish cynic”: Black, 56.

  10 “any other position in public life”: Roosevelt, quoted in Schlesinger, 1:342.

  11 “would not do to ask”: Butler to Roosevelt, quoted in Morgan, 176.

  12 “I'd never felt”: Roosevelt, quoted in Schlesinger, 1:367.

  13 “rebuild his broken body”: David M. Kennedy, 98.

  13 “No matter”: Elliott Roosevelt,
F.D.R.
:
His Personal Letters
, 2:562.

  14 “The circumstances”: Black, 183.

  14 “acrobat”: Ibid., 1020.

  14 “As 1928 drew to an end”: Ibid., 188.

  14 “fierce hatred”: Mencken, quoted in David M. Kennedy, 99.

Chapter Three: A New Deal for the American People

  15 “a breadline for big business”: Manchester, 1:54.

  15 “There were miles of highways”: Vanderbilt, 80.

  16 “What this country needs”: Hoover to Morley, quoted in
Time
, “The Presidency: Wanted: A Poem.” October 3, 1932.

  16 “wild-eyed Utopian”: Hofstadter,
American Political Tradition
, 383.

  16 “During the 1920s”: Shannon, ix.

  17 “overproduction and underconsumption”: Manchester, 1:37.

  17 “a demoralized people”: Walter Lippmann, quoted in Manchester, 1:36.

  17 “altruistic suicide”: Manchester, 1:36.

  17 “Surely, thought thousands”: Shannon, x.

  18 “amiable boy scout”: Walter Lippmann to Newton D. Baker, quoted in Steel, 291.

  18 “a highly impressionable” … “dying day”: Lippmann, quoted in Steel, 291–92. Steel wrote: “Lippmann's critics never let him forget that phrase, later citing it as evidence of his bad judgment. Yet at the time it was not so far off base.”

  18 “on the grounds of great intellectual capacity” … “a man who thinks” … “That they all lived”: Ibid., 291.

  19 “I regret that I am late” … “I warn those nominal Democrats” … “I pledge you”: For accounts of the acceptance speech, see Schlesinger 1:313. For the convention see
New York Times
, “Official Report of the Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention,” June 20–July 4, 1932.

Chapter Four: The Tombstone Bonus

  21 “I done it all by my feet”: House Committee on Ways and Means, 72nd Cong., 2nd Sess. 382–83.

  22 “hunger marchers” … “Diamonds were the symbol” … “regaled several Cabinet members”: Pearson and Allen, 10ff.

  23 “Despite all the Red rhetoric”: Dickson and Allen,
Bonus Army
, 45. Captain Charles H. Titus of the Army's Military Intelligence Division was the undercover operative. His observations are in the “Military Intelligence Division Correspondence, 1917–41” file at the National Archives, Record Group 165, Box 2856, File 10110-2674. For the most thorough and eloquent depiction of the subject, see Dickson and Allen,
Bonus Army
. Also see Lisio,
The President and Protest
; Ortiz, “Rethinking the Bonus March”; and contemporaneous press accounts.

  23 “a force superior”: Folliard.

  23 “cruelest year”: Manchester, 1:35.

  23 “rock bottom”: Ibid., 1:1.

  23 “permitted to rig”:
New Yorker
editor Harold Ross, quoted by Josephson,
Infidel
, 87.

  23 “If you steal $25”:
Nation
, March 8, 1933.

  24 “were suffering in a rural gethsemane”: Manchester, 1:41. For incisive, and insightful, accounts of the toll of the Great Depression, see Manchester, David M. Kennedy, Frederick Allen, both Leuchtenberg volumes, and the first volume of Cook.

  24 “Babies go hungry”: Allen, 58.

  24 “America was at a standstill”: Cook, 2:25.

  24 “viability of the country's institutions”: Black, 251.

  24 For the Red Scare and state militias, see Josephson,
Infidel
, 98.

  25 “precarious moment”: David M. Kennedy, “The Great Depression: An Overview,” a March 2009 essay for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Chapter Five: The Forgotten Man

  26 “for the most fundamental realignment” … “economic constitutional order”: Richard Parker, “The Crisis Last Time,”
New York Times
, November 9, 2008.

  27 “that build from the bottom up”: Daniels, 214. The use of the phrase was widely seen as a “bastardized concept originated by William Graham Sumner,” as author Jonathan Alter put it (Alter, 90). See also Shlaes, 12.

  27 “hatred” … “put on his high-button shoes” … “was lucky to come back alive”: Manchester, 1:61.

  27 “We've got to crack him”: Hoover, quoted in Alter, 121.

  27 “deliberately chose the low road” … “a fear”: Manchester, 1:61.

  28 “Uncle Sam”: Eslick, quoted in Dickson and Allen,
Bonus Army
, 126–27.

  28 “Every other interest”: Dos Passos, “The Veterans Come Home to Roost.”

  28 model for an integrated society: NAACP writer Roy Wilkins, paraphrased in Dickson and Allen,
Bonus Army
, 7.

  28 “made for America” … “For Mr. Hoover”: Waters, quoted in Winslow, 29.

  29 “every kind of cockeyed”: Dos Passos in the
New Republic
, June 1932.

  29 “stick it out!” … “Cunning Communists”: Cox and Coughlin, quoted in Dickson and Allen,
Bonus Army
, 106.

  29 “body vermin”: Ibid., 107.

  29 “rag-and-tin-can city”: Henry.

  30 “ideal American soldier”: Teddy Roosevelt, quoted in Dickson and Allen,
Bonus Army
, 151.

  30 “I'm here because I've been a soldier”: “Butler Tells Bonus Vets to Stick It Out,”
Times-Herald
, July 20, 1932.

  30 “slip over into lawlessness”: Butler, quoted in Dickson and Allen,
Bonus Army
, 152.

  30 “carefully advised”: Schmidt, 218.

30–31 “desperate summer” … HOOVER LOCKS SELF IN WHITE HOUSE: Manchester, 1:1.

  31 “most dangerous men in America”: Tugwell,
Brains Trust
, 194.

Chapter Six: Warriors of the Depression

  32 “Warriors of the Depression”: Dickson and Allen,
Bonus Army,
65.

  32 “trained men”: Ibid., 211.

  32 “incipient revolution was in the air”: MacArthur, quoted in Black, 241.

  33 “This is political” … “MacArthur has decided”: Manchester, 1:13.

  33 “We thought it was a parade”: Witness Naaman Seigle, quoted in Dickson and Allen, “Marching on History.”

  34 “Men and women were ridden down”:
Baltimore Sun
reporter J. F. Essary, quoted in Dickson and Allen,
Bonus Army
, 174.

  34 “It was like a scene”: Associated Press, quoted in Manchester, 1:15.

  34 “was very much annoyed”: From the unpublished biography of George Van Horn Moseley, quoted in Dickson and Allen,
Bonus Army
, 179.

  34 “did not want either himself”: Manchester, 1:16.

  34 “It would not be the last time”: Dickson and Allen, “Marching on History.”

  34 “I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch”: Eisenhower, quoted by historian Stephen Ambrose in ibid.

34–35 “Come on!” … “a blaze so big”: Manchester, 180–81.

  35 “the most critical situation”: Doherty, 43.

35–36 “It is my opinion” … “If there was one man”: MacArthur press conference, July 29, 1932. War Department transcript, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, Bonus March, Presidential File, Box 23.

  36 “Soup is cheaper”: La Guardia, quoted in Manchester, 1:18.

  36 “Hounding men”: Ibid.

  36 “What a pitiful spectacle”:
Washington Daily News
, July 30, 1932. Quoted in Dickson and Thomas,
Bonus Army
, 194.

  36 “[There] is nothing left inside the man”: Roosevelt, quoted in Black, 242.

  36 “the deep social cleavage” … “a potential Mussolini”: Lisio, 285.

  37 “Well, Felix”: Brands, 259.

Chapter Seven: Happy Days Are Here Again

  38 “But the rout”: Lisio, 2.

  39 “Yes” … “It was called the Dark Ages”: Keynes, quoted in Manchester, 1:35.

  39 “We are today in the middle”: Keynes, quoted in Ahamed, 4.

  39 “The way most people feel” … “crank candidates”: Ibid., 59.

  39 “although subjected”: Steel, 291.

  39 “his mind is not very clear”: Ibid., 293.

  39 “a vigorous well-intentioned gentleman”: “What To Expect,”
Time
, November 21, 1932.

  40 “What they saw”: Manchester, 1:60.

  40 “to prevent extortion against the public”: Rosenman,
Public Papers
, 740.

  40 “the development of an economic declaration of rights”: Hofstadter,
American Political Traditions
, 430. “Every man”: Ibid.

  40 “A glance at the situation”: Roosevelt speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, September 23, 1932. Schlesinger, 2:425–26.

  41 “It was a real shocker”: Tugwell, 176.

  41 “well of pessimism”: Farley, 31.

  41 “Now I will have no identity” … “turmoil”: Alter, 134.

  42 “This is the greatest moment”: Manchester, 1:54.

  42 “there was no” … “gathering economic storm clouds”: Moley,
After Seven Years
, 65.

  42 “You know, Jimmy”: James Roosevelt and Bill Libby, 142. See also Davis, 2:378.

Chapter Eight: Brain Trust

  43 For the origin of the Brain Trust, see Rosenman,
Working with Roosevelt
, 56–59; and Moley,
After Seven Years
, 1–9; Alter 97ff.; Schlesinger, 1:415ff.

  44 “notoriously impractical”: Rosen, 114.

  44 “an amusing hanger-on”: Alter, 97.

  44 “considered all policy”: Black, 227.

  44 “a shrewd salty Irishman”: Schlesinger, 1:374.

  44 “Rex was like a cocktail”: Moley, 15.

  45 “I have not the slightest urge”: Moley, quoted in Schlesinger, 1:400.

  45 “a grown-up Boy Scout”: Schlesinger, 1:407.

  45 “He was a progressive vessel”: Tugwell,
Democratic Roosevelt
, 36.

  45 “men who rushed forward”: Davis, 2:307.

  45 “new political landscape”: Cook, 2:15.

  46 “Your distant cousin is an X”: Johnson, 329.

Chapter Nine: Winter of Our Discontent

  47 “Winter of Our Discontent”: Shakespeare,
Richard III
, act I, scene I.

  47 “I wish for you”: Hoover to Roosevelt, quoted in Davis, 2:392.

  47 “On the subjects”: Roosevelt to Hoover, quoted in Freidel, 18.

  47 “rang alarm bells”: Davis, 2:393.

  48 “the boldest alibi”: Black, 253.

  48 “The bubble burst first”: FDR, quoted in Bernstein, 1.

  48 “the tar-baby” … “To touch it”: David M. Kennedy, 105.

  48 “enshrined in human instincts”: Hoover, quoted in Davis, 2:397.

  49 “had all the appearance”: David M. Kennedy, 105.

  49 “attempt to mousetrap him”: Black, 255.

  49 “By March 4”: Freidel, 73n.

  49 “do anything to save America”: Eleanor Roosevelt, quoted in Manchester, 1:84.

  49 “used Hoover as a foil”: Alter, 139.

  50 “either did not realize”: Moley, quoted in David M. Kennedy, 110.

  50 “We now have the fellow”: Manchester, 1:84.

Chapter Ten: Year of Fear

  51 “The situation is critical”: Steel, 300.

  51 “reluctant convert” … “to obstruct” … “The danger”: Ibid., 299–300.

51–52 “take control of the government” … “Call out the troops”: Manchester, 1:65–66.

  52 “organized refusal”: Davis, 2:366.

  52 “glue that holds societies” … “Capitalism is on trial”: Manchester, 1:65–66.