Forgotten Man, The (44 page)

Another problem, less articulated, was a simple economic one. To raise wages without increasing output hurt company profits and made goods more costly for consumers. Perhaps some of the companies could afford that, but it was no incentive to produce. Some consumers might be able to afford higher prices—but others, those working in nonunion industries, might not be able to. The idea that an increase in labor’s wages would automatically restore the economy to its 1929 level was taking a long time to prove itself.

At the TVA, too, there was trouble. Roosevelt had fueled the tension between Lilienthal and Morgan by leading both men on. But this year, Lilienthal’s biographer notes, the president was “studiously uninterested” in the fight at the TVA. Lilienthal found the going “tough”; both he and H. A. Morgan, his ally, hunted for evidence that A. E. was cooperating with Willkie. By September, A. E. Morgan would go on one of his retreats and leave his affairs to be managed by Harcourt Morgan. Wrote one TVA official in his diary of the dream: “Our own TVA is almost
bellum omnia contra omnes,
a war of all against all.” Scarcely what the New Dealers had hoped for.

Every day there were more dark reports from Russia. Stalin had been holding his trials for some time. He had also announced an increase in his war budget of a full third. In June came news that he was trying eight of his most important generals, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a World War I hero well known to Americans. And the trial would be secret. Tukhachevsky had escaped the Germans four times in that war, but it did not seem likely he would escape his fellow Soviets. The intellectuals in New York had enormous trouble with this announcement, coming as it did on top of Trotsky’s flight from Russia. They had always thought that in its way Leningrad was like New York and Paris. But the Soviets were proving that their cities were disastrously different.

Mary McCarthy typified the sudden indecision. McCarthy at first supported Stalin, as did her friends. And like her peers, she made a show of spurning the bourgeoisie; at the end of the summer of
1937, in fact, she was living an ostentatiously bohemian life with Philip Rahv, a Russian émigré, in a borrowed apartment on East End Avenue. In the summer, McCarthy handed in to the
Nation
a review that would be published just below one by Rahv. Her review attacked an American newspaperman who had published a book titled
The American Dream.
The author, Michael Foster, had written about “the quiet decent people…the silent ten percent whose names are not often on page one, because they are so busy, and who pay very little attention to the shooters and the grabbers.” McCarthy dismissed the author’s emphasis on this group as “absurd.”

At the same time, however, McCarthy was having her doubts about her own positions, most of which involved events in the Soviet Union. She was considering committing herself to Trotskyism. “Tukhachevsky’s murder could not make us happy—on the contrary,” she would write later. “More than I, Philip grieved, I suspect; a boyish part of him was proudly invested in the Red Army.” Trotsky had been thrown out of Soviet Russia. New York writers created a Commission of Inquiry on Trotsky, essentially to generate documentation of the travesty of Soviet justice in his ejection. John Dewey, now in his late seventies, that fall would lead the commission to Mexico to interview Trotsky. “It was the most interesting single experience of my life,” Dewey would say of the trip. Already, in the summer, Trotsky’s claims about Stalin were being vindicated anew each day, in the news. Even he was perturbed. In early July the papers reported that he was off on a fishing trip in Mexico. He told the reporters that “I want to get away from civilization and the press.”

Like Tugwell, McCarthy was also beginning to try on new roles. Building in McCarthy’s mind was a fiction story that she would eventually title “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” The story takes place in the mid-1930s, on a train ride. A young woman writer is heading west to get a divorce, just as McCarthy herself had done. The charm of the character’s first husband, a Marxist theater man, has worn off. Now she does not know what she is looking for. But she is certain that she detests the bourgeois—the type of man who, a decade earlier, would have been called a Babbitt. Then a perfect
example of that bourgeois enters the club car, a man in a Brooks Brothers shirt. He is a businessman, a man who has seen the world, and a man who makes companies grow. In short, a description that makes him clearly out of the question as a romantic partner for Mary’s character.

But gradually, over whiskey and then trout, the young woman finds herself interested. “I’ve never known anyone like you. You’re not the kind of businessman I write editorials against,” she tells him. In the morning, she wakes up to find herself in his berth. The theme of the story is clear: the divorce is not merely that of one person from another, but also from the tedium of left-wing politics. “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” was published later and McCarthy’s biographer reports a rumor that the traveler in the story was Wendell Willkie. This was never proven. But the story, in any case, described the summer of 1937 perfectly: a summer in which intellectuals were either becoming Babbitt, or at least getting to know him better.

And one of the Babbitts of real life
was
Willkie, who now popped up frequently at dinner parties in New York. In these years, Willkie was not merely battling Lilienthal; he was also getting around: among those he would meet were the authors Carl Sandburg, Rebecca West, Dorothy Thompson, James Thurber, the publisher Helen Reid, Henry Luce of
Time,
and the correspondent William L. Shirer. He socialized—and exchanged ideas—with everyone, in a fashion that would not have been possible for a utilities lobbyist in Washington. He often left Edith behind. Shirer later recalled that Billie, as she was known, spent afternoons at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, across from the apartment. “You couldn’t help but admire her. She was probably terribly hurt. But she wasn’t going to ruin his career.”

The most important of Willkie’s new acquaintances in 1937 proved to be Irita Van Doren, the literary editor of the
New York Herald Tribune.
A year older than Willkie, she had ended her marriage with Carl Van Doren, the historian.

Irita Van Doren’s relationship with Wendell Willkie was a version of the relationship between McCarthy’s intellectual and her Brooks Brothers man. In the McCarthy story, the love affair is short-lived—
the girl turns back in revulsion. In McCarthy’s real life that also proved the case, for she shortly remarried. Her new husband was to be another intellectual, in fact the leading intellectual of her era: Edmund Wilson. Wilson had just the year before published a book likening Stalin’s Russia to Roosevelt’s America:
Travels in Two Democracies.

But Van Doren and Willkie were not a fiction, but rather a real story. Their romance shortly became something like a marriage, with weekends at her house in West Cornwall, Connecticut, and visits to her apartment on the West Side. Willkie, like Insull before him, thought he might please his sweetheart by wiring her house for electricity. Just as Insull had once strung cable out to Libertyville, Willkie now asked industry friends to wire Irita’s house in West Cornwall—she had only kerosene lamps. The fact that Willkie was, to the core, always a utility man showed up too in the manner in which he expressed his friendship for Dorothy Thompson, Sinclair Lewis’s wife and Irita’s friend. A few years later, after a visit to Dorothy’s country place in Vermont, he sent her a refrigerator.

Willkie was so proud of Irita, he could not stop himself from bragging. Harold Ickes would later write, “Willkie likes to play with a lot of women and is quite catholic in his tastes.” At some point, Willkie would even tell Lilienthal about his relationship with Van Doren. Van Doren and Willkie were close, Lilienthal would write in his diary: “Wendell told me, rather explicitly, how close.” Lilienthal was not leering; the relationship seemed to him “touching and beautiful.”

But what mattered most was what Willkie and Van Doren learned from each other. He probably exposed her to new economic ideas. He joked that their friendship certainly would not please “your old friends on
The Nation.
” Still it was Willkie who was the principal learner in the relationship. With Van Doren as a tutor, Willkie studied political and literary classics. He told her that he was interested in the South and that he had thought of writing a history of forgotten figures in American history.

He had always been a follower of Woodrow Wilson’s; he believed in reasonable reform at home and democracy abroad. That was what
he shared with Newt Baker, one of the Democrats whom Roosevelt had beaten out for the nomination in 1932. Now Willkie ranged wider. A couple of years into his conversations with Irita—in 1939—he would even publish a review in her paper of a book about one of the old UK Whigs, William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, “the evening star of the great day of the Whigs.” Willkie’s message in the book review for his contemporaries was that business, and perhaps his own utilities industry, had brought some of its troubles upon itself by forestalling reform. He quoted Lord Melbourne as noting: “Those who resist improvements as innovations will soon have to accept innovations that are not improvements.”

Willkie’s publishing and his time with Irita were about more than history. In discovering the old British Whigs, he discovered their liberalism—a liberalism that antedated Wilson and focused on the individual. It resembled the liberalism of Europe that he had heard about in childhood. Revisiting that old liberalism, he could see that while Roosevelt might call himself a liberal, the inexorable New Deal emphasis on the group over the individual was not liberal in the classic sense. Liberalism had historically included liberal economics, and Roosevelt had turned away from that. Willkie was finding the intellectual ammunition for his battles, and Irita was helping him do it.

At the same time, other New Dealers and Democrats were also redefining themselves through new personal relationships, all of which, in one way or another, affected their political lives. Ickes was now a widower—his wife, Anna, a Republican legislator at the Illinois statehouse, had died in 1935. In 1937 he was busy trying to convert a tempestuous affair with a Smith College girl, Jane Dahlman, into a marriage. In May he purchased a real country estate, the 230-acre Headwaters Farm, in Maryland, complete with servants’ quarters. Ickes had lived well before, but the new spread somehow mattered more, especially in a man whose projects had, over the years, targeted wealth. The spring of 1937 had brought news of the revenues from the forced sale of the furniture in Insull’s Chicago penthouse: $26,000, far below the $100,000 expected.

It was now already a few years since Paul Douglas had ended his marriage with Dorothy Wolff. After the marriage, Dorothy headed left. With his new wife, Emily, Douglas was moving to the center—and becoming especially suspicious of the Communists. Hence, at least in part, his caution over the report on the Chicago strikes. Later he would write in his memoir that he regretted Roosevelt’s recognition of the Soviet Union. Few on the Soviet trip, he now realized, had perceived the threat that Stalin’s regime represented.

Tugwell’s administrative assistant at the RA, Grace Falke, had come to New York as well. She would now become director of the arts project of the National Youth Administration (Harry Hopkins’s sister had also worked there, for a time). And Tugwell was not about to forget her. In August of the following year Tugwell’s wife of twenty-five years, Florence Arnold Tugwell, would travel to Yerington, Nevada, to obtain a divorce. Tugwell would marry Grace in November 1938—Fiorello La Guardia performed the ceremony.

By July of 1937, the New York intellectuals were looking out at their country again—and again seeing more trouble on the horizon. Still thanks to the Wagner Act, the unions were growing astoundingly: the United Automobile Workers membership would by September reach 350,000 or so, a full ten times its size the preceding year. But that only seemed to make them more bellicose. In Michigan, the CIO was making matters hard even for a sympathetic governor, who had been unwilling to call out the police at the sit-down strikes.

Roosevelt was so irritated at both sides in the steel discussions that he quoted Shakespeare at them: “a plague o’ both your houses.” Much of the country felt the same—they might like the idea of organized labor, but they felt the CIO went too far. Nor did it, necessarily, represent the average worker. Odette Keun, a European journalist, came over to study the TVA and the American labor movement. After a long visit she made a conclusion that shocked her: “Labor in America is conservative. It is one of the most flabbergasting discoveries I have made.” This conservatism, she wrote, was partly due to the retrograde American Federation of Labor. But it also was “due to the
temper of the American workingman himself. In general his sense of solidarity was for a very long time nonexistent; it is not at all effective yet.” Keun was ambivalent about this discovery but took pains to report honestly what she had found: “the workingman en bloc is still no revolutionist. He still has not the fanatical hatred of the capitalist. He still has no essential feeling that the system is essentially unjust, infamous, execrable, and must be wiped off the face of the earth.”

A problem that Keun did not address was also becoming obvious: the Wagner Act was, at least in the short run, continuing to hurt profitability at companies. In August General Motors, which had suffered some of the worst strikes, reported that sales were up. Way up, both for the three-month and the six-month period. Earnings, by contrast, were down. The new wages and the costs of the strikes had made the companies less valuable. Roosevelt’s groups were once again at odds: unionized workers versus shareholders.

A new respect for conservatism was also evident in the book business, where many of the intellectuals worked. The Russian books had done very well at the beginning of the decade. Political books still sold: Drew Pearson’s
Nine Old Men
was on the best-seller list in Atlanta. Self-help books, history, religion, and escape also sold. A regular standout, at the top of the list, was
Gone with the Wind,
the novel by Margaret Mitchell, the wife of Willkie’s employee at Georgia Power. Another best seller was
Orchids on Your Budget,
a relentlessly cheerful personal finance guide that ordered Americans to persevere even in the face of tight budgets. Yet another was
How to Win Friends and Influence People,
Dale Carnegie’s self-help book—his movement was not so different from Bill W.’s. Even
American Dream,
the book that McCarthy panned, was on the list of top sellers in Los Angeles. There were yet more self-help books:
Mathematics for the Million,
for example. Odette Keun was right: America simply was not conforming to the Left’s expectations. The country’s old self-improvement impulse was prevailing, flowering even.