American Experiment (297 page)

He looked the part of the fighter as he castigated his enemies, his rubbery features tightening in righteous wrath, hair streaming down on his face, arms pumping, voice driving and piercing. His tactics as governor provoked his foes to fight back through investigations, the courts, an impeachment effort, appeals to Washington, but with little success. Long’s power stemmed more and more from practical action. Out of his contempt for the old guard, the wide exposure to suffering people he had gained as a door-to-door salesman, and the snubs he was handed by the socially privileged of his adopted city of Shreveport came a lifelong concern for the poor that as governor he converted into tangible results. In a state crying for expanded public services, he and his allies immensely enlarged the Louisiana highway system, built bridges, improved public health services, provided schoolchildren with free textbooks, upgraded the school system in general and Louisiana State University very much in particular.

A “bad Huey” appeared to struggle with a “good Huey”—his ruthless power-seeking versus his concern for people, his challenge to the establishment that included an unconstitutional effort to tax advertising in large newspapers, his attack on privilege that left out solid measures such as child-labor laws, minimum-wage laws, old-age insurance. Still, by the early 1930s the “Kingfish,” as he now liked to be called, had clamped so firm a grip on Louisiana politics that he could agitate on the national stage as a United States senator. This brought him into political collusion and then collision with Roosevelt.

The collusion was strictly practical. When the Roosevelt forces at the 1932 Democratic convention supported the seating of Long’s delegation, the senator worked to keep Louisiana and other southern delegates in line for the New York governor. The two men had never liked each other. Long considered Roosevelt a political dilettante; after Montana senator Burton Wheeler, along with George Norris, had helped bring him around to the
governor, Long told Wheeler, “I didn’t like your son of a bitch,” but would support him. Roosevelt, for his part, viewed the Louisiana senator as one more strident voice that could be kept in harmony by judicious combinations of evasion, flattery, and deals. But behind practicalities and personalities lay an ideological conflict that Roosevelt had not yet fully grasped. Long was determined to carry his populist and egalitarian ideas into the national arena, while the President was still engaged in brokerage. Meanwhile, the Kingfish would maintain his grip on his Louisiana base, using his own judicious combination of force, fraud, and favors.

The collision was not long in coming. The Hundred Days electrified the country but turned off Huey Long. He opposed the Economy Act, anti-inflation efforts, the Administration’s rejection of the veterans’ bonus payment, and above all the NRA. On a visit to Roosevelt, the Kingfish played the boor, keeping his straw hat on, or whipping it off to tap the President on the knee or elbow; but he could not puncture FDR’s genial façade. “What the hell is the use of coming down to see this fellow,” he muttered on leaving the White House, “I can’t win any decision over him.” About ready to break away from Long, the Administration cut off patronage and reopened a suspended probe of Louisiana shenanigans. Long compared Hoover to a hoot owl and Roosevelt to a scrootch owl.

“A hoot owl bangs into the roost and knocks the hen clean off, and catches her while she’s falling. But a scrootch owl slips into the roost and scrootches up to the hen and talks softly to her. And the hen just falls in love with him, and the first thing you know,
there ain’t no hen.
”

Long would evade the scrootch owl. Early in 1934 he announced over a radio network his plan for a new national organization, the Share Our Wealth Society, with the slogan “Every Man a King.” It would fight for the egalitarian principles the Kingfish had long since proclaimed: heavy taxes on big fortunes and incomes, guaranteed family income, and the rest. Long was now adding a plan for local Share Our Wealth clubs that would blanket the nation. Popular reaction was quick, strong, and sustained. Tens of thousands of letters and applications poured into Long’s offices during the succeeding months—so many that Long had to set up a work force that spilled out of his Senate office into extra rooms and even into the corridors. By the end of 1934 his Share Our Wealth movement boasted of having three million members—though observers then and later differed over the extent to which this was a solid following or a “glorified mailing list.”

By this time Long had established a communications kingdom of his own, embracing his monthly newspaper,
American Progress;
his autobiography,
Every Man a King;
a huge mailing and “membership” list; and frequent
recourse to the NBC radio network. This last was crucial. Ad-libbing freely, using his voice skillfully, attacking his foes unstintingly, quoting the Bible promiscuously, he built up by 1935 one of NBC’s biggest audiences.

It was clear that the 1936 election campaign would be dominated by three masters of the radio. The age of electronic political communication was already underway.

On the face of it, Roosevelt seemed to be riding high politically as he entered his midterm in January 1935. He and his party had won a convincing victory in the congressional elections two months before. Many of his New Deal programs were solidly in place. The great mass of people still loved him, many to the point of veneration.

The President, in fact, was headed into a time of troubles, and he may have known this, at least intuitively. While European affairs were relatively quiet for the moment, Hitler had consolidated his power and seemed more threatening and truculent than ever. Not to be outdone, Mussolini was threatening war in Ethiopia over territory on the border of Italian Somaliland. The murder of King Alexander of Yugoslavia by a Croatian terrorist in Marseilles had left people with revived memories of the assassination in Sarajevo twenty years earlier, and its dire consequences. In January the President, a supporter of the World Court, was handed a sharp reminder about the limits of his own power over foreign relations when the Senate vote for membership in the World Court failed of the required two-thirds.

But Roosevelt’s main troubles lay at home. Politically he was little daunted by the resurgence of business opposition on the right, because the Liberty League and the rest gave him choice campaign targets. Far more threatening was the mobilization of popular forces behind Long, Coughlin, and the other voices of protest; and probably Roosevelt sensed that the expectations he had aroused in his first two years were rising to new heights and would now sweep back onto the Administration. It is doubtful, though, that the President yet felt intimidated by this prospect; he was an old hand, after all, at operating in the political center against both right and left.

Rather, his main problem during these cold winter weeks was intellectual. This leader who had showed himself such a master of experimentation, improvisation, and tactical maneuver now had to face hard strategic alternatives that embraced policy and program as well as politics. He had still made no final choice between conciliating or at least mollifying business and seriously reforming it, between ordering and rationalizing
business in the spirit of the NRA and atomizing or regulating it in the spirit of Louis Brandeis, between balancing the budget and spending heavily to meet acute human needs. Go left or stay in the center? To move right was not an option for the New Deal.

Nor could the President fall back on concerted advice from his staff. Raymond Moley, frustrated by FDR’s improvisations, was drifting back to private life; Tugwell saw the New Deal as incomplete; Berle feared that the Administration was disintegrating. Louis Howe, who had kept his boss close to the great constituencies of need that made up the foundation of the Democratic party, lay dying of emphysema during the early months of 1935; he slipped away in mid-April. Even before Howe’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt felt that her husband was seeing a narrower range of advisers. Molly Dewson, on the firing line at Democratic party headquarters, was concerned about the President’s faltering leadership. To worriers the First Lady gave the President’s response: “Please say to everyone who tells you that the President is not giving leadership” that he was working closely with Congress, “but this is a democracy after all, and if he once started insisting on having his own way immediately, we should shortly find ourselves with a dictatorship.…

“The ups and downs in people’s feelings, particularly on the liberal side, are an old, old story. The liberals always get discouraged when they do not see the measures they are interested in go through immediately.…

“Franklin says for Heaven’s sake, all you Democratic leaders calm down and feel sure of ultimate success. It will do a lot in satisfying other people.”

Western and southern farmers were especially impatient with FDR by 1935. For two years agricultural politics, policy, and administration had epitomized the character of the first New Deal: improvised, experimental, controversial but neither radical nor conservative, basically humane. The Agricultural Adjustment Act had been hammered out during early 1933 amid heavy pressures from farm interests and desperate farmers. These pressures had continued to affect its administration, and the fearsome drought of 1934 had intensified the desperation. Supporters of diverse policies—higher farm prices and inflation in general, the old McNary-Haugen scheme for stimulating farm sales abroad and stabilizing farm prices at home, refinancing of farm debts, raising farm prices by cutting down production—continued to fight for their particular road to agricultural salvation.

Roosevelt’s farm effort embraced elements of these and other policies, but the heart of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration program lay in the Domestic Allotment plan. This meant “plowing every third row under” and slaughtering little pigs (so they would not become big hogs
and inflate supply). Nothing could have been more shocking to a world with a half-billion or more hungry people, to a nation that measured progress by productivity, to millions of Americans long undernourished, and to the farmers themselves. In Georgia, a cotton planter carefully marked off twenty-five acres to be plowed up and told several tenants that someday soon he would tell them to go to it. A field investigator overheard the tenants’ murmured conversation.

“You know,” said one, “I ain’t never pulled up no cotton stalks befo’, and somehow I don’t like the idea.”

“I been feelin’ sorter funeral-like all afternoon,” said another. But a third had a happier thought.

“Let’s swap work that day; you plow up mine, and I’ll plow up yours.”

Henry Wallace and his Agriculture Department appeared to face almost insuperable problems. They had to cope with a hundred or so zealots in the farm bloc in Congress who watched their every move. In the Senate they confronted some of the most powerful and prestigious lawmakers, many of them prima donnas. From the old, northern-based Grange on the right to the National Farmers’ Holiday Association on the left they were lobbied by some of the most potent farm and commodity groups in the nation, including the well-entrenched American Farm Bureau Federation and the militant Tenant Farmers’ Union. Processors, railroad and other transportation interests, farm equipment makers, rural banks, and others stood guard over their turfs. These groups were as quick to unite against a minor perceived threat as they were slow to unite behind a program for farmers as a whole.

Bolstered by Roosevelt’s backing and popularity, funds from processing taxes, and inspirited leadership by talented federal administrators, the AAA promulgated its rules, set up its field staffs, issued its millions of checks, and pumped money into the nation’s fiscal bloodstream. Yet the AAA paid a price. To get quick results it often had to make peace with legislators, state officials, county farm agents, with the whole panoply of state and regional interests and institutions. Some states had wanted the AAA to be administered through their own departments of agriculture. In Georgia—the President’s “adopted state”—the right-wing populist governor, Eugene Talmadge, followed policies almost opposite to those of the New Deal.

Like an old wooden plow worn and splintered by rocky soil, the Agriculture Department, and especially the AAA, was itself cleft by the economic and political ground it worked in. Offices and bureaus dependent on client groups jousted with one another. Old department hands fought with young New Deal activists. Interests inside and outside the department
competed for funds. Centralizers debated with Brandeisian decentralizers. Quick-action enthusiasts pleaded with due-process literalists. A major result of these internal conflicts was that the AAA did reasonably well the work that everyone wanted—getting money into the hands of “constituents”—but did not have the grass-roots clout to bring about fundamental change.

One of these conflicts seemed relatively unimportant in itself but triggered a major crisis in the department. Virtually all the New Dealers in Agriculture were intent on getting AAA money into the hands of tenant farmers and sharecroppers as well as planters and landlords. But some feared “unnecessarily” provoking local resistance, especially of dominant white groups in the South. The question of whether the 1934-35 cotton contract required the landlord to keep the same tenants or the same
number
of tenants brought matters to a head. Militant New Dealers feared that the latter interpretation would enable landlords to “hire and fire” tenants at will within their set number. When the AAA’s general counsel, Jerome Frank, interpreted the contract to require the retention of tenants, AAA chief Chester Davis sacked him and several of his associates.

This much-publicized “purge” of February 1935 exposed Roosevelt’s plight at midterm. His farm laws, improvisations, and experiments had opened a hornet’s nest of controversial policies, programs, and personalities that were failing to bring a genuine new deal to hundreds of thousands of tenants, sharecroppers, and farm laborers. Along with the financial and psychological relief he had given millions of people, he had aroused consciousness of the need for change without bringing about fundamental or enduring transformation. Hence he confronted farm groups and constituencies more aroused and hopeful than ever. Poor farmers, however, still lacked the catalytic leadership that could jolt them into effective political action; the question by 1935 was whether they would turn to Franklin Roosevelt or some other leadership between “Lenin and Christ.”