Forgotten Man, The (18 page)

Still, trading in kind, especially when one did not live on a farm, did not feel like progress. Even vallars could not keep mortgage holders from losing their homes. People were beginning to realize that the problem was simply not something they could solve in the neighborhood, or even in the state. The hour of the vallar was merely that—an hour.

From Northampton, on November 7, Coolidge did his duty and issued a final plea for reelection. “All the teachings of common sense require us to reelect Hoover,” he told radio listeners.

As for Roosevelt’s advisers, they were now in an intense negotiation for jobs in his administration. Henry A. Wallace, the son of the old agriculture secretary, published a puff piece in the
New York Times
about the merits of Roosevelt’s outreach to farmers; Hoover was staged, while Roosevelt had “genuineness,” he wrote. There was another set of Henrys: Morgenthau, a Democratic leader, badly wanted his son, Henry Jr., to have a role in the new government. Henry Jr. was trying out a life at farming, in Roosevelt’s Dutchess County. Both men hoped that Roosevelt would name Henry Jr. to the post of agriculture secretary as the second Jewish cabinet member, the first having been Oscar Straus under Teddy Roosevelt. The
chances looked pretty good—the Roosevelts and Morgenthaus were neighbors in Dutchess County.

At Albany, and in New York, other job applicants were gathering. Lilienthal, perhaps unaware that Frankfurter himself had been playing catch-up as recently as the convention, nursed his contact with Frankfurter. He also tried to build connections with any other New Dealers he could throughout the 1932 campaign. October found him in Washington interviewing with Berle, the speechwriter. Lilienthal also saw Frankfurter and Justice Brandeis. And that same month Lilienthal delivered a speech—a sort of public job application—arguing that holding companies represented “a social loss to the community.” Frankfurter reported back that his words had earned “high praise.” Whatever came after the election, Lilienthal wanted to be part of it.

Early in November, Roosevelt defeated Hoover by seven million votes. The victory was so thorough that Hoover was shocked. Even Boulder City, the town created by the project that he had brokered, wanted him out: 1,620 out of 2,074 voters went for Roosevelt. Hoover nonetheless headed out west to look at the one project he still had the most hopes for. Around the world, the papers trumpeted the new U.S. president. Among the most pleased were the Soviet leaders. “Russians Hopeful of ‘a New Deal,’” ran the headline of a dispatch from
New York Times
correspondent Walter Duranty on November 10. The Soviet Union’s leaders hoped that people like the travelers would now convince FDR, finally, to recognize Russia.

But in America, at least at the outset, there was little sense that Roosevelt would create a leadership of the Left. Instead the view was that this crisis would need men from all political backgrounds. Now a number of Wall Streeters joined the brain trust and gathered around the new president, knowing that only Washington and Wall Street together could fix the monetary situation. Among those who visited with the president were James Warburg, the young banker who had walked away from Hoover’s Commerce Department offer, and Alfred Lee Loomis, the venture capital man. On Thanksgiving, the victorious FDR struck an especially intimate tone with his radio
audience when he referred to a section of the Episcopalian’s Book of Common Prayer that was intended for worship within the family: “Remember in pity such as are this day destitute, homeless, or forgotten of their fellow-men.” The effect of the phrase was subtle; Roosevelt was suggesting his motto had a provenance—not the Sumner essay, but the prayer book. Sumner, himself trained as an Episcopalian clergyman, would have approved heartily of the use of the phrase in a religious context, meaning the man deserving of charity, for example. But Roosevelt was not so much thinking of religion as allowing that the religious impulse of charity should find expression in the political sphere.

Hoover, meanwhile, was still trying to absorb what had happened to him. He paid a surprise visit to the Hoover Dam—“I never in my life saw a man look so worn out,” recalled an observer at Boulder City. Recognizing, better perhaps than any man, that something had to be done over the course of the winter to slow an alarming spread of the bank crisis, he made a point of showing himself to be a good soldier. He wrote memos. He telegraphed Roosevelt to ask for a meeting on the international debt problem—but also, really, in the hopes the two could be partners over the coming months. His moratorium was coming to an end and Britain and France were begging for reconsideration. Hoover, his Treasury Secretary, Ogden Mills, Roosevelt, and Ray Moley met at the White House, all so nervous that they smoked—Hoover had a fat cigar. Fixing his eyes on the presidential seal, or occasionally Moley, Hoover spent an hour reviewing the problem, and while they agreed on some things, he did not convince Roosevelt to join him in a plan to work together throughout the interregnum.

But there was always hope Roosevelt would shift. While Hoover waited, he laid the cornerstone for yet another large building—the new Labor Department; the masons who helped him used the same trowel and gavel used by Washington himself at the construction of the Capitol in 1793. He spoke of the wonders of American labor, which functioned well in a country with no “class distinctions.”

Early in January Roosevelt joined Senator Norris at Muscle
Shoals, a clear signal from him that the Tennessee River was replacing Niagara Falls in his thoughts.

Days later, Coolidge died suddenly at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, the Beeches. Mellon, aboard the SS
Majestic
on one of his transatlantic crossings, sent a radio note of condolence: “Coming in the vigor of his activity, it is indeed a loss for all our people.” The effect of the death was to seal the conviction that the country could not go back to the 1920s, even if it wanted to. Willkie at this time had some news of his own. He became president of Commonwealth and Southern. He was also doubtless concerned about what was going on at home: farmers from Indiana, like those from six other states, were striking at the state capitals to win moratoria on their crushing debt and tax burdens.

The uncertainty of the interregnum took its toll. When the banking crisis grew yet worse, Hoover tried contacting Roosevelt, even sending at one point a lengthy personal letter. Historians would later note that Hoover’s sense of urgency even showed up in the way he addressed the letter, misspelling Roosevelt’s name “Roosvelt.” Roosevelt was cruising the coast of Florida; Hoover expected to meet on his return. But Roosevelt was not interested in cooperation. We will never know all his motives, but it was clear that a crisis now could only strengthen his mandate for action come inauguration in March. Hoover became incensed at the silence, and took to documenting his own goodwill in the name of an accurate history. In late February, one of the lowest moments—as the Dow stood at just above 50—a manufacturer would leave a phone message for Hoover. He had had a meeting with Tugwell, who had confirmed that the new administration had no interest in cooperating. Hoover wrote a formal letter to the manufacturer to put on record what the man had reported to his secretary: “I beg to acknowledge your telephone message received through Mr. Joslin, as follows: ‘Professor Tugwell, adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt, had lunch with me. He said they were fully aware of the bank situation and that it would undoubtedly collapse in a few days, which would place the responsibility in the lap of President Hoover.’” Hoover added his analysis: “When I
consider this statement of Professor Tugwell’s in connection with the recommendations we have made to the incoming administration, I can say emphatically that he breathes with infamous politics devoid of every atom of patriotism. Mr. Tugwell would project millions of people into hideous losses for a Roman Holiday.”

The brain trusters were ferociously busy and in an expansive mood, a fact that their opponents were quick to take advantage of. Hoover was not the only one to quote remarks that Tugwell imagined he was making in private. In addition to his lunch with the manufacturer, Tugwell had granted an interview to a journalist who seemed to him “a kind of minor Lincoln Steffens”—a muckraker. He had not yet had too many experiences with newspapermen, and told the man “we were talking off the record.” The journalist interpreted this to mean he could write what Tugwell said and attribute it to him, but not quote it. On January 26, the
New York World Telegram
printed Tugwell’s thoughts, calling them “an authoritative outline of what the new administration plans”: “Drastically higher income and inheritance taxes,” large changes in agriculture, and other dramatic proposals.

“I was appalled,” Tugwell wrote—not about the content of the article so much as about the high position he appeared to give himself, and about betraying Roosevelt’s plans too early. But Moley reassured him, he later wrote, that these things happened. Besides, Moley added, what Tugwell had laid out “wasn’t a bad program.” But in his diary, Tugwell made a vow: “I shall never trust another reporter.”

Tugwell suggested that as agriculture secretary Roosevelt appoint Henry A. Wallace. “Rex, I really ought to be working for you,” Wallace said when he formally offered Tugwell the job of assistant secretary. Stuart Chase was not in the Roosevelt coterie but was finding a role as the brain trusters’ scribe and herald. In February 1933 Chase was traveling the country, arguing that purchasing power would help to restore the country. In the restaurant of the Hotel Utah at Salt Lake City—one of the scrip towns—he met Marriner Eccles.

Over lunch, Eccles asked Chase about the brain trusters, and
Chase asked Eccles for his views on the economy. Eccles lectured Chase on the need for spending to forestall inflation. Deficit spending could conceivably slow or reverse a downturn. This argument was a limited one, especially for its time. Even in 1932, government spending from Washington was such a small share of the economy that increasing it would not matter much. Still, Chase believed the idea that the economy needed more money was essentially accurate. “Why not get yourself a larger audience?” Chase, impressed, asked.

Eccles already had a date to testify before the Senate Finance Committee. He would tell the committee that Washington needed a $2.5 billion spending plan, as well as higher estate and inheritance taxes. But Chase offered something that might lead to a longer stay in Washington than the overnight visit of a hearing witness: a letter of introduction to Tugwell, still in New York.

Tugwell agreed to receive the banker from Utah at Columbia; he was, as Eccles later reported in his memoirs, late for the meeting because of a dentist appointment. The pair headed off for lunch at a drugstore booth. Eccles was amused by the venue choice; “the setting of food and pills was appropriate to the talk we had about the nation’s ills.” Tugwell was gloomy, and his gloom seemed justified: by inauguration day, a few days hence, most banks in the land would be closed or under some form of restriction. The early months of 1933 were seeing some of the worst joblessness of the slump—or in memory. At that point Washington did not quantify unemployment as it does today, but conservative estimates suggest that then, in the fourth year of the slump, up to three in ten workers were unemployed.

In January, Germany held elections; this time, it looked as if Hitler would indeed be able to form a government. At the end of the month, president-elect Roosevelt received a letter from 800 professors and university presidents, a missive from the academy on a scale with the letter Hoover had received in regard to Smoot-Hawley. This time too the issue was the “critical world situation”—a phrase that referred to Germany but also, likely, to trade. The signatories included George Counts and John Dewey. The proposed solution was the academic club’s boldest gesture on behalf of the Soviet Union
taken to date: Roosevelt should do what preceding presidents had not, and recognize Russia. Recognition became the central news story about Russia, obscuring other events there, including the news that Stalin was moving forward in the North Caucasus with the collectivization of agriculture.

William Green of the American Federation of Labor instantly repeated his opposition to the prospect. But the world was changing. The same day the
New York Times
carried the report of the professors’ petition and Green’s objections, January 30, the paper also told of the meeting between Germany’s president Hindenburg and Hitler that would lead to Hitler’s ascent as chancellor. Several months later Mrs. Corliss Lamont, the daughter-in-law of Thomas Lamont, one of the top executives at J. P. Morgan, would announce the creation of an additional committee to recognize Russia. Another group of women also signed a recognition petition that went to the president—signers included Mrs. Lorado Taft, Paul Douglas’s new mother-in-law, and Jane Addams of Chicago, as well as Amelia Earhart, Ida Tarbell, and Irita van Doren in New York. It was not yet clear whether Roosevelt would actually act, but it was clear that he would take the idea of recognition far more seriously than had Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, or even Wilson’s secretary of state, Bainbridge Colby.

Meanwhile, as a cultural accompaniment to the political theme of the Forgotten Man, Warner Brothers was readying a film for the inaugural year, titled
Gold Diggers of 1933
. At the end Joan Blondell sang a song about what the Depression had done to World War I doughboys:

 

Remember my forgotten man,

You put a rifle in his hand;

You sent him far away,

You shouted, “Hip, hooray!”

But look at him today!

 

Over the lengthy months before the March inauguration, and certainly through the weeks after, the country indeed saw Roosevelt as a
savior—as his voice on the radio, and the money problem, had convinced them to do.