Forgotten Man, The (38 page)

To smear Butler was to smear his fellow Catholic Al Smith. And the book also did that: “And as Al’s hatred for Roosevelt has deepened, so also has Butler’s, a hatred not merely against the President, as is Al’s, but against all things for which the president stands.” Willis Van Devanter was “The Dummy Director,” who suffered from “literary constipation.” But Van Devanter came off well next to Sutherland. The authors said of the justice and former head of the American Bar Association: “Van Devanter has brains. Sutherland has not.” Treated worst of all, perhaps, was McReynolds, who often led the way when it came to reinforcing the traditional concept of “liberty of contract”—and who had snubbed Frankfurter’s sociological arguments as poor logic years ago. Pearson and Allen titled their chapter on McReynolds “Scrooge.” They also reported that court insiders had long ago tried to decide whether he was “chiefly stupid or lazy”—and then concluded he was both. The aim of the book was not so much to attack the Four Horsemen as to shame or intimidate Justice Roberts into switching sides and tipping the balance.

Tugwell was still under attack, but he tried to concentrate on his work. That same month—March—a draft proposal for one of the many new settlements came across the rural administrator’s desk. This one was a cooperative farm for poor families to be built in a far-
off, almost hidden place: an area called Casa Grande in Pinal County, Arizona. The land around the area had only lately become arable, after the construction of the Coolidge Dam, and seemed like a good prospect as a Resettlement Administration project. The condition of the people in the area was simply miserable. “Eight families occupied a shed, divided by chicken-wire into compartments measuring 18 by 24 feet, with dirt floors.” Other families “lived in sheds made of box wood and cardboard, tin cans flattened.” Now, on 3,000 or 5,000 acres, the RA would attempt to build a model farm community.

Tugwell’s life was changing—he was spending time with his assistant, Grace Falke, and still wondering if Columbia might welcome him back. There had been a nibble—more than—from Yale Law School, but the job hadn’t worked out. But he took his time over Casa Grande. He didn’t like rural resettlement; still, this was the sort of experiment he had been dreaming of even back in the days of his Russian trip. Now he and his team “did all we could,” as he would later recall. The project envisioned eighty individual farm units of forty acres each; the government bought the land and would supply the new farmers with everything from loans to get started to seeds to toilets and running water; the individual farmer-owners would eventually pay off their loans. Tugwell signed off, making a very small change—he increased the allowance for household equipment and furniture to $400 from $200. But he was not yet pleased—a life of experience in agriculture, his abiding instinct for efficiency, and his own advisers all told him that forty acres per family would yield only a bare living. The builders began the homes, but Tugwell sent his experts back to study whether the farm might work better as a large cooperative.

That same March, Tugwell and Stryker’s photographer Dorothea Lange was returning from her field trip. As she would later recall, she was driving sixty-five miles an hour, tired and cold, when she saw a sign at Nipomo, California: “Pea-Pickers Camp.” Later she remembered an “inner argument”: “Dorothea, how about that camp there? What is the situation back there? Are you going back?” After twenty miles had passed, she did a U-turn, and found a thirty-two-year-old
mother in a lean-to nursing a baby. There were older children; the mother “said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed.” Lange picked up her camera.

Lange did not have her pictures alone in mind when she left the camp; her first move was to alert the newspeople she knew that the people there were starving. As her biographer Milton Meltzer reports, this did much good: officials rushed 20,000 pounds of food to feed the California migrants. Beside the story about this, the local paper published two of Lange’s photos of the thirty-two-year-old mother in her lean-to. A third photo—from the same shoot, but not in the paper at that time—would be the one later called
Migrant Mother.
It depicted a thin woman, almost recalling Mary Magdalene, holding her baby, with two others behind. The photo captured the despair of the Depression more than any Lange had taken.

In April, the unions paid Roosevelt back in a more formal fashion. George Berry of the printing pressmen’s union and Sidney Hillman created the Non-Partisan League, which was dedicated to electing Roosevelt, the unions’ answer to the Liberty League. That same month brought another achievement for the New Deal. Norris Dam’s powerhouse was up and running. Roosevelt himself, pressing a golden telegraph key in his office, sent the two dam gates down to hold back the water. Willkie had lost
his
bet. Alabama Power’s old contract with the TVA was now in jeopardy: from this date on, the TVA had leeway to sell power and find markets where it liked.

Meanwhile, Hopkins’s WPA was now operating all across the country. Within nine months of its establishment, it had increased its rolls to over three million. The Federal Writers’ Project in April employed a total of 6,686 writers. That February, Henry Alsberg, the director of the Writers’ Project, announced that his authors would produce a new guide to America, a giant project. Authors would résumé cultural activities and geography of each state, from the festival of Los Hermanos Penitentes in New Mexico to the islands off Georgia, where Norsemen were believed to have settled a millenmium prior.

Roosevelt for his part was watching the Court, but still silently. That spring, the justices rejected a New York State minimum wage law—a law that Frankfurter had had a personal hand in drafting. The case,
Tipaldo,
was remarkably reminiscent of
Schechter.
A Brooklyn businessman—this time John Tipaldo, a laundry operator—had paid his laundresses less than the minimum wage. Would the Court stop nowhere? the president and his allies wondered. Did the states have rights at all to pass social legislation?
Tipaldo
seemed to say that they did not. Only 10 of 344 newspapers liked the
Tipaldo
decision. This time, the nation seemed to share the White House’s sense of impatience. Hoover sided with Roosevelt, saying, “Something should be done to give the states back the powers they thought they already had.”

Roosevelt was also waging battles on the tax front, for Congress rejected the first version of the undistributed profits tax. Morgenthau weakened: “I have come to the decision that I cannot take the risk of giving up something that I have in hand, namely $1.13 billion in revenue, for the possibility of getting roughly $1.7 billion.” The administration then cobbled together, with lawmakers, a new plan: a graduated surtax on the corporate income tax—again, an antitrust measure—plus an increase on the intercorporate tax rate, as well as a new undistributed profits tax, albeit at lower rates than originally planned. Morgenthau later recalled: “Nobody in the Treasury wanted to testify. Everybody was frightened except Herbert Gaston, who wrote the statements I needed. I had to stand up like a column of concrete, but I had the backing of FDR. He wanted to wipe out special privilege.” In the end the tax did make it into a new bill, in a watered-down version.

These little details did not really do much damage to the Democrats, for the Republicans were flailing. At a fretful convention in mid-June, uncertain party leaders selected Kansas governor Alfred M. Landon as their candidate. But Landon failed to distinguish himself from Roosevelt. The telegram on policy he sent to the Republican convention before the roll call vote of his nomination differed, as he would put it much later, “not too much” from the Democrats’. In
the nominating speech, John Hamilton of the national Republican committee spoke of the importance of combating “great combinations of wealth”—a Democratic theme.

To add to its woes, the Grand Old Party was also stuck in an awkward place on foreign policy. The old “stay out” position, which had seemed reasonable in the 1920s, was looking increasingly questionable in the context of the news reports from Europe. Mussolini had occupied Ethiopia, and that same month—June—Haile Selassie was begging the League of Nations for help in Geneva: “It is us today. It is you tomorrow.” Left-leaning magazines were carrying reports of the torture and murder in Germany’s early concentration camps, reports that were increasingly hard to discount as Marxist propaganda. Yet leading Republicans—Herbert Hoover being the prime example—were still interested in working with the Germans. Perhaps because Hoover himself had created what were called concentration camps in the United States during the 1927 flood, he could not fathom the German version.

Roosevelt, smelling victory, did not let up. He traveled to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia to attack the “economic royalists” of American business for bringing down the economy. The government, Roosevelt said, had to help citizens “against economic tyranny such as this”—there was no other power. As for taxation, it was now crucial: Ickes would remark in his diary that “the fundamental political issue today is taxation.” A number of former Roosevelt allies spluttered with rage, including Warburg, whom Coughlin had so misleadingly assigned to the list of Roosevelt’s current allies. Warburg, still fuming, published yet another book since his breakup with Roosevelt,
Still Hell Bent
, a follow-up to
Hell Bent for Election
of the year before. But the Warburg household was not content to stop there. Warburg’s wife, Phyllis Baldwin Warburg, published
New Deal Noodles,
a book of alphabet rhymes about the New Dealers: “the whole new deal is full of hickies. One of these is Mr. Ickes”; “‘T’ stands for Tugwell and dear TVA; ‘T’ stands for the Taxes we’ll all have to pay.” Ray Moley was still moving from critic to opponent. The president did call on him from time to time, but he was refus
ing, as he later put it, to be a “jester” in Roosevelt’s court. Instead of talking with one another, the parties were now talking past each other. Moley warned of a devastating counterreaction.

To the incumbents that risk seemed small. Over the course of the summer, the effect of Roosevelt’s spending was still strong, and the jobs materializing seemed a wonder after so many years. The same Benjamin Anderson who had tracked earlier damage now recorded the upturn in his office at Chase in New York. Together he and Colonel Leonard P. Ayres of the Cleveland Trust Company visited Landon in Topeka. They told him that the economy was moving up, and Landon later recalled, “I knew then that I was beaten.”

Even as Landon doubted, a new factor began to work in the Democrats’ favor. A drought worse than that of 1934 hit the land. Families in a thousand counties were affected, one-third of the nation.

The drought supplied Tugwell’s RA with new purpose. That summer the RA provided aid—from cash to short-term jobs—for 400,000 families. The RA had an enormous loan component, and it declared a one-year moratorium on payments and allotted millions in new loans. It was a legitimate high point for the RA. What’s more, the drought validated Roosevelt’s allegation that the country was still in “emergency.” It made a mockery of the “self-government” argument for localities by Republicans at the Cleveland convention, and it made the need for the New Deal seem permanent. Tugwell himself was to travel 2,000 miles, and to make a showing with Roosevelt in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Over the drought summer the writer John Steinbeck, already well known for
Tortilla Flats,
was traveling among the RA’s dusty demonstration camps for migrants. He made the acquaintance of Tom Collins, the RA employee who designed camp operations. Collins was creating a women’s club that would be a model for such a club in Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath.
Collins likely also introduced Steinbeck to Sherm Eastom, whose family was one of the models for the Joad family in the novel. Collins wrote lengthy reports to his employers—one appeared that summer in the
San Francisco News
—
that later served as additional material for Steinbeck. In the September 12, 1936, issue of the
Nation,
Steinbeck wrote a column that served as a nonfiction outline for his book. He commented that people like A. J. Chandler, publisher of the
Los Angeles Times,
or William Randolph Hearst, or Herbert Hoover, operated big farms. These farms, he said, were proliferating at the expense of the disappearing medium-sized farm. Then he went on to report, of the arriving Okie, that “in the state and federal camps he will find sanitary arrangements and a place to pitch his tent.” Conditions in the privately owned camps of farmers, Steinbeck reported, were by contrast horrific.

Meanwhile, too, Tugwell’s buildings, his towns and settlements, were coming along—both under his direct supervision and via his influence. Beltsville, Maryland, saw the erection of a structure dedicated to animal husbandry, one of his old favorite subjects. Tugwell’s greatest pride was Arthurdale in West Virginia: it had a vacuum cleaner assembly plant. The town also had a chicken farm run by a cooperative, a small-scale rebuttal to
Schechter.
Mrs. Roosevelt liked it, especially; later in the year she would note in her syndicated column that the chicken farm was “doing very well.”

Casa Grande would also have chickens. The builders had worked ahead, laying out two-acre plots. But as the year advanced, Tugwell and his advisers were still turning over the format of the farm in their minds. The individual farms would simply yield too little. What were title and ownership worth to a man just scraping by? On paper a co-op or collective looked much more efficient, yielding $19 an acre instead of $14. Assailing “bigness” was fashionable now—that is what they were doing at the White House, at the Treasury, and in Congress. John Steinbeck might also find large-scale projects evil; the author’s
Nation
piece in September criticized some of them. But election year or not, everything in Tugwell’s philosophy and experience told him that a large cooperative taking advantage of the economy of scale would make more sense: one tractor for all. There was a sense of urgency now; the gossip against him was hard to ignore. For as long as he stayed in government, Tugwell determined, he had to
do what he believed. He made Casa Grande a cooperative. The farmers would share the land.