Forgotten Man, The (48 page)

The next year, 1939, was a turning point for many old Roosevelt hands. On January 4, Roosevelt phoned Frankfurter to tell him he was nominating him to the Supreme Court—despite an earlier visit by leading Jews who had warned him that Frankfurter on the Court would provoke anti-Semitism. Touched by Roosevelt’s move—and by his disregard for the cowardly Jewish group—Frankfurter was speechless. Later, Frankfurter would pen Roosevelt a letter on Supreme Court stationery: that the gift of the nomination was one he “would rather have had at your hands than at those of any other President barring Lincoln.”

The same month, the Associated Press carried a lengthy story on Casa Grande. Robert Faul, the manager for whom the government had such hopes, had left in a rage. “Quits FSA, Likening Project to Soviet’s,” read the headline. Faul hadn’t gotten along with his government managers, but there were other problems. The collective setup was not overriding other disadvantages, including some it had created. In the first year, Casa Grande had lost $3,069. A water shortage had plagued the settlement; the project planners had anticipated the problem and dug a deep well, but now a nearby Indian reservation was claiming that the water was theirs, and Casa Grande had not been able to use it.

What’s more, the farmers found themselves railing at being treated like shift workers and had fought back against Faul. The farmstead feel of farming, the farmer and his own land, was missing. Factions formed: Okies challenged farmers who had arrived earlier. In nearby towns like Florence and Coolidge, public opinion began turning against Casa Grande. The more the farmers in Pinal County thought about the Casa Grande concept, the more it did not make sense to them. As in the case of the Schechters, poultry was a source of tension. Poultry, along with dairy, had lost money the first year. A visiting economist asked a struggling farmer near Casa Grande what he thought of the cooperative poultry coops. “It’s all right, I guess,” he would say. “But the thing I can’t figure out is how a man tells his own chickens apart, runnin’ them all together like they do there.”

The people of Coolidge and Florence “kidded the settlers about being ‘reds’ when they met them in the gasoline stations, over the counters and in the barber shops,” wrote a social scientist who documented the period later. The settlers, many of whom were not politically oriented, felt demeaned. “You know how it feels when first one person then another asks you if you’re sick and tells you you look pretty bad? After a while you begin to think you’re sick as hell and maybe going to die. Well, that’s what happened to Casa Grande.”

Even as Casa Grande was faltering, however, Bill Wilson’s community was finding its feet. Now there were meetings, both in Akron and New York; even when Bill was not present, the principles—alcoholism was a disease, alcoholics could form a voluntary community to help one another—seemed to be working. In January Wilson sent four hundred copies of
The Big Book
out to interested parties, truly wanting the movement book to be a collaborative effort. He was getting the feeling the book was powerful; at least two people had found a way to recovery after reading the unpublished draft. On June 25, the
New York Times
published a review of his book, now officially titled
Alcoholics Anonymous
. It was a rave: “Lest the title should arouse the risibles in any reader,” wrote the reviewer, “let me state that the general thesis of
Alcoholics Anonymous
is more soundly
based psychologically than any other treatment of the subject I have ever come upon.”

But Europe again was intruding. Hitler threatened the Jewish population in a speech at the Reichstag, signaling that there would be no letup after Kristallnacht. The pollster George Gallup noticed that public opinion was shifting: “A majority of Americans are now in favor of doing exactly what the Neutrality Act forbids”—supplying Europe with arms or food. In a March 1939 poll, 76 percent of those polled responded yes to the question: “In case war breaks out, should we sell Britain and France food supplies?” In April that share became 82 percent. Gallup was also doing work on relief payments for the poor, and here, the attitude was shifting as well. Two in three Americans favored returning relief administration to the states, and taking it away from Washington. Eighty-four percent believed that politics colored the administration of relief payments.

Meanwhile, Father Divine pressed closer to Roosevelt. As the 700-acre Vanderbilt estate just to the north of the Roosevelts was among the many large properties in the United States for sale, Father Divine would propose to buy the mansion, Corinthian columns and all, and its grounds. The real estate agent, a firm called Previews, publicly put Father Divine off, saying, “On the face this rumor is absurd. Properties marketed through Previews are always offered with full consideration for neighborhood standard and welfare.” A singing group like Father Divine’s—nearly all black—was not welcome in Dutchess County. “The mere submission of an offer by Father Divine is no indication that it will be considered,” the firm said. But it was the White House, not the realtor, whom Father Divine was addressing—and in correspondence as formal as Andrew Mellon’s missive. A letter would go to Mrs. Roosevelt, a telegram to the president:

 

Hon. Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Hyde Park,
New York

With respect and appreciation of your many humanitarian efforts and your very democratic administration in Washington,
I wire you as a matter of courtesy to ascertain your views on a matter which intimately concerns your Hyde Park home. I wrote Mrs. Roosevelt at Washington yesterday, but waited to communicate with you until I had record of your whereabouts.

My followers wish to purchase the Vanderbilt estate at Hyde Park as a private residence for me and my staff and a place where I can receive distinguished guests. As this is very near your estate, I have withheld my approval of the plan until I could consult you. I would not for a moment wish to embarrass you or your friends in the least. Would you be so kind as to let me know whether or not it would be pleasing to you for this property to be used for such a purpose. I should appreciate a frank statement immediately if convenient.

Peace.
Rev. M.J. DIVINE
(Father Divine)

 

It was Mrs. Roosevelt who was the first to respond, on August 12. “My dear Father Divine,” she wrote. “I have talked with the President in regard to your letter and your telegram to him, and he is writing you, telling you that there can be no reason against any citizen of our country buying such property as he wishes to acquire.” But the president, she said, was also writing, in part to let Father Divine know that the Vanderbilt estate had a special feature, its arboretum, remarkable in the rarity of its trees. “For some time,” therefore, she noted, the president had been “trying to interest some public or quasi public body in the acquisition” of the estate. Steve Early, the president’s press spokesman, sent a similar, but more detailed, letter.

By this time, however, the Roosevelts were deeply distracted. Just as blacks feared, war again was postponing civil rights action. And within days of the Divine letter came the biggest news of the year, that Stalin had signed a nonaggression agreement with Hitler. Germany had immediately attacked Poland. The old English and American Left felt shock yet again; yet again, there was a reevaluation of the 1930s. W. H. Auden would capture the disillusionment in verse:

 

The clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade

 

Roger Baldwin was on the beach at Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard when he learned of the news. “I think it was the biggest shock of my life. I never was shaken up by anything as I was by that pact—by the fact those two powers had got together at the expense of the democracies.” He reflected—perhaps recalling what Emma Goldman had written him upon reading
Liberty under the Soviets
in the late 1920s—“I frankly admit that people as naïve as you are hopeless. They see the world and the struggle through romantic rosy eyes as the young innocent girl sees the first man she loves.” Baldwin would now determine to change the ACLU and clear its board of people who supported undemocratic regimes—or were affiliated with an entity that was not democratic, ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the Communist Party. In an intense search of his soul, Baldwin was realizing that his institution must alter its premises to function.

Willkie was also changing. Just a week before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he and David Lilienthal had finally signed off on the transfer of the Tennessee Electric Power Company to the TVA. “Tennessee, sixth floor,” the elevator boys called out to the crowd arriving for the transaction at the First National Bank of the City of New York. Lilienthal, in a pin-striped suit and checked red tie, was all seriousness. Willkie, always the good sport, put a good face on the handover check of $44,728,300 at the ceremony. In his remarks he made it clear that Americans should be wary about this deal. Stockholders might do all right—that was what Lilienthal was emphasizing—but what did the trend mean for the utilities customer? That was less obvious. The Dow’s utilities index stood in the lower 20s, lower than during
Ashwander
. “We sell these properties with regret,” he told the papers. And he issued a statement—in turn provoking Lilienthal—reminding the public that the New Dealers and the TVA had forced the sale on Commonwealth and Southern. Later, he would debate Felix Frankfurter, at the Harvard Club. He headed up to Irita’s in West Cornwall afterward to show off the check.

But Willkie also felt relieved about the sale, because it gave him a chance to move on to broader projects. He thought about the articles he was now writing, which ranged far beyond the power issue. Over the weekend he and Edith headed to Saugatuck Harbor to visit Russell Davenport, an editor at
Fortune,
and his wife. Smoking furiously, Willkie talked about everything under the sun with Davenport. Davenport was also concerned with the future of liberalism—in fact, at Yale he had organized a Liberal Club. Though they had come together over the utilities question, now much of the talk was about Europe. Maybe it was time to start moving the Republican Party away from the isolationists. The pair also discussed the possibility of Willkie, a Democratic businessman, running for the presidency. It seemed unlikely—unless, conceivably, the convention delegates were divided.

Whatever was coming next, Willkie was confident about it. Like Bill W., he was groping for a new format, a way to rally countrymen so that they could find courage. In June, he had published an article in the
Atlantic Monthly.
“Brace Up, America,” Willkie exhorted. Maybe he could build a campaign around that. If Americans could revive their old sense of economic liberty, not much could stop them. Joblessness was drifting downward, back toward the levels of the election of 1936. American business was waiting for an excuse to recover; even the bitter peace that Willkie and Lilienthal had concluded seemed to provide such a one. That autumn, Willkie finally registered as a Republican, telling Edith, “Well, I’ve done it.”

Father Divine also would not be put off. His followers would proceed, he wrote to Roosevelt, in the purchase of the Vanderbilt estate. And he would advise them “to use the property as described by you,” allowing the ground floor as a public museum. Nonetheless, Mrs. James Laurens van Alen, the seller, blocked the transaction, announcing she had no intention of selling to Father Divine. The next news in the papers of the story would come in February 1940, when the president disclosed that the federal government had plans to acquire the Vanderbilt property, allowing the public to enjoy both the trees and the architecture of the mansion. Mrs. van Alen would give the property to the government.

Father Divine would not stop his real estate dreaming—he bought a fifty-room mansion in New York, and inquired about a property in Newport. And Bill Wilson persisted. Still, Father Divine’s peace movement looked increasingly out of place; his followers would in coming years be arrested for failing to report to the draft board. Bill Wilson too found his attention altered by the war. He had served as a soldier at the end of World War I. Within two years, he would be trying to reenlist—though he was too old for combat, he would go to the trouble of collecting a recommendation from a colonel to serve at the army’s quartermaster depot in Philadelphia.

Though these events were in the future, the change was already clear. In March 1940 the columnist Arthur Krock would pen an essay about the eighth anniversary of the New Deal. But the article was not about the alphabet agencies, or the rages of Jimmy Warburg, or the Supreme Court: “Foreign Problem Uppermost,” it read.

January 1940
Unemployment (year): 14.6 percent
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 151

ONE WINTER NIGHT IN EARLY
1940 a twenty-eight-year-old named Oren Root went to hear Herbert Hoover speak to the Young Republican Club of New York. Root was the grand-nephew of Elihu Root, who had served as William McKinley’s secretary of war and Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of war and state. He lived with his parents and worked on Wall Street as a junior lawyer. Like his ancestor, Root was preoccupied with international events. Germany had invaded Poland a few months before, and now reports of civilian murder, torture, and flogging in the former republic were coming almost routinely. The issue of the hour was what the United States could do to stop a European war.

Hoover’s facial features were now assembled in a permanent configuration of chagrin, but he had not given up on the game. Lately he’d busied himself collecting statements from Republican delegates who might be friendly toward a Hoover candidacy at the GOP’s convention a few months hence.

Yet, Root discovered, Hoover was saying little that Republicans had not said before. Even worse—for, especially in an election year, presentation mattered a lot—the ex-president would take questions only in writing. After introductory remarks, Root recalled, Hoover “ran through” the questions written on the papers “as one would shuffle a deck of cards.” Eventually Hoover came to a query about the policy of the United States in the event that German arms jeopardized the future of France and Britain. Since Germany had already invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia, and France was still thinking in the context of its Maginot Line, the question seemed reasonable. Hoover dismissed it, Root later recalled, “with the comment that it was too impossible an event to warrant comment.”

The weakness of the performance shocked Root. After all, 1940 was the year when, finally, Republicans had a real chance at the presidency. They’d made those gains in 1938. The concept of a third term for one individual in the presidency seemed improbable, even if the figure was Franklin Roosevelt. To find Hoover once again hogging the Republican stage was unacceptable. Root thought about the other Republican possibilities—Thomas Dewey of his own New York, Robert Taft of Ohio, and Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan in the Senate. He wondered, he would later write, “whether they offered the answer to our problems.” Dewey was a New York prosecutor—indeed, some of his more publicized cases had involved the same business as the Schechters’, the live poultry market. He was zealous and personally brave: he had faced down mobster Dutch Schultz, who at one point had put out a contract on Dewey’s life. He was a New Yorker, and New York was electoral king. But Dewey was hard to like. There was something simultaneously cold and juvenile about him—later, when he ran for president, Ickes would joke that he “threw his diaper into the ring.” And, like many litigators, he was weak on policy itself. He took too few clear positions.

Root believed several things. The first was that the struggle for Europe was related to the struggle to get beyond the New Deal at home. The second was that though the country was not ready in January or February to talk about war, the presidency might end up
going to the man who understood that the United States must involve itself in Europe and that foreign policy had to do with growth at home. Indeed, Root was willing to bet on it. And right now one person on his horizon fit that description: Willkie. Willkie was an old Wilsonian. Willkie understood that democracy was at stake. Root was braver than the leaders of his petrified party. He decided it did not matter that Willkie had become a Republican only the year before. Willkie was, at least, “positive and constructive.” Root decided to float Willkie as a candidate. What did he have to lose?

Several months after the Hoover meeting, Willkie provided Root with a format for doing so. With the aid of Russell Davenport, he published his own political manifesto in
Fortune.
The title was “We the People.” The manifesto spoke to Roosevelt directly. “In the decade beginning 1930 you have told us that our day is finished, that we can grow no more, and that the future cannot be equal to the past. But we, the people, do not believe this, and we say to you: give up this vested interest that you have in depression, open your eyes to the future and help us to build a New World.” Root, feeling the adrenaline rise, wrote his own pro-Willkie petition, basing it on
Fortune
language: “Because Wendell Willkie does not believe in this philosophy of defeat we welcome him.”

The petition that Root created said that Willkie would “be the defender of our power”—the power of the country as a whole—“and not of the power of any institution or favored group.” There were fifteen places for signatures, and instructions that completed pages be returned to Root’s residence at 455 East Fifty-seventh Street, New York City. Root mailed off his petitions to two groups in his world—the alumni of Yale’s class of 1925 and Princeton’s class of 1924. The reaction, he later recalled, was “immediate and overwhelming”; those who did not receive copies of the petition printed out more. The phone switchboard at Root’s law office was also “swamped, to the exclusion of the firm’s proper business.” The partners at Root’s firm were not pleased.

Willkie protested showily—he had Thomas Lamont, his friend from the New York Economic Club and a partner at J. P. Morgan,
ring up the young Root to scare him off. But when the scare tactic failed to intimidate Root, Willkie went along. Other fans printed up tens of thousands of Willkie buttons. Through the energies of Root and others, Willkie Clubs were starting across the nation. Root even traveled to Oscaloosa, Iowa, on the train to help a Willkie Club get started.

Willkie liked Root’s wager. He made it his own. He launched his campaign from Irita’s West Side apartment—though the papers did not mention the venue. Irita saw what the chance meant for Wendell. Edith also went along, graciously appearing as the spouse in public. The Katharine Hepburn film
State of the Union
later fictionalized such a threesome.

At the start, there were mainly scoffers. Root and Willkie might have been thinking about Europe, but many Americans still wanted to tell themselves that staying out might keep the European conflict smaller. The American Left was in a state of shock after the Nazi-Soviet pact. Willkie was seen as a setup, a puppet of a party in disarray. Felix Frankfurter called Willkie “Wonder Boy,” the same phrase that Coolidge had contemptuously used for Hoover. The best putdown came from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of TR and an establishment Republican. People said Willkie had come up from the grass roots, but she quipped that those grass roots were “the grass roots of ten thousand country clubs.”

This argument, however, weakened when it became clear that, despite his Wall Street allies, Willkie was garnering at least a following across the nation. Though the economy had at times recovered, it was still, international observers noted, nowhere near as strong relative to other nations as it had been. The United States was not the power it had been. The reputation of the New Deal was continuing to drop.

In part this was because people were taking in the longer-term consequences of all the experiments. At Casa Grande, the settlers were still having trouble putting down roots. They had come to the farm to be homesteaders, and now they were more like tenant labor. That year, 1940, the farm would have a new regional director, Lau
rence Hewes. From James Waldron, the farm supervisor, Hewes heard what was coming to be a familiar story: “There is a definite split in the membership and very strongly opinionated, in fact almost bitter, groups have developed.” The division: “one group wishes to get everything possible from the government in the way of wages, benefits subsidies, etc, and also to control association on a political basis. The other group, in our opinion, has a more fundamental outlook. They look to the future of the organization.”

Hewes that year decided to find a “high-type educator”—what Hewes thought of as a $6,000-a-year man—to fix the social problems at Casa Grande. But a senator from Arizona who had an interest in the project insisted that the person to fill the job had to reside in Arizona. Hewes gave up the plan, certain he couldn’t find such a person in this state. Morale worsened. Later in the year, Hewes on a visit, would discover the ultimate expression of the settlers’ opinion of Tugwell’s project. They had trashed the community house.

But such domestic minutiae were hard to concentrate on—even for Tugwell. All spring, Hitler seemed on the edge of invading the countries of Western Europe. The
New York Times
that winter was reporting the possibility of a record famine for the occupied areas. The paper noted that the Belgian Relief Unit foresaw “the worst suffering in the history of the Western World.” Suddenly the war was becoming an issue, just as Root and Willkie had thought it might.

And Root’s campaign had generated 200,000 signatures in advance of the June convention. Willkie’s New York socializing had paid off. Henry Luce put his press empire behind Willkie, and
Life
magazine fronted him, printing a picture of Willkie’s already large head that was bigger than life. Hubert Kay wrote in the magazine, “In the opinion of most of the nation’s political pundits Wendell Lewis Willkie is by far the ablest man the Republicans could nominate for president at Philadelphia next month.” Even Roosevelt was impressed, understanding that Willkie, unlike Dewey, Landon, and certainly Hoover, matched him when it came to charm. Over and again, people found that meeting with the utilities executive changed
the course of their lives. Willkie would make such an impression on the poetess Muriel Rukeyser that she would, decades later, publish a 330-page epic poem about him. Especially inspiring to many Americans was Willkie’s good humor. “With malice toward none”—the theme of a 1939 article—was a great change from the sour rage of the Liberty League. It was also a change from Roosevelt, whose lists of names were hard to forget.

As the Nazis rolled forward in Europe, Willkie gave a speech at home in Indianapolis. He charged that Roosevelt practiced a “technique of defeatism” and was militarily unprepared for war. The country was more sophisticated than it had been in the past—certainly more sophisticated than in the days of World War I, when Germans were still called Huns. Instead of counting against him, Willkie’s German background was actually an advantage. As refugees from Prussian Germany, Willkie’s family knew all too well about European tyranny. Willkie himself had served in World War I. When Willkie argued from Indianapolis that the Europeans’ cause was the American cause, the Germans, the Poles, the Czechs of the Midwest all understood.

Roosevelt shot back in a Fireside Chat in late May. The unpreparedness argument was wrong—the United States had spent a billion on the navy under Roosevelt. The U.S. Navy was “far stronger today than at any peace-time period in the whole long history of the nation.” The United States must pay attention and help “the destitute civilian millions”—if only through the American Red Cross. Europe was not “none of our business.” The United States could not retire “within our continental boundaries”—a defense policy that invited future attack. Still, these revisions did not stop Willkie’s momentum. Dorothy Thompson, the journalist, was in Paris before the Nazis marched in that June. She sent home a dispatch arguing for a joint nomination by Democrats and Republicans of a Roosevelt-Willkie team. (Roosevelt would have none of it, writing to a friend who knew Thompson: “Do try to get that silly business of Wendell Willkie out of her head.”)

Politics is not exclusively about absolute numbers; it is also about relative change. Because Willkie was such a dramatic dark horse, his new popularity raised enormous hopes for him at the Republican convention in Philadelphia. To be sure, Dewey was still a favorite. And Hoover was there, spoiling the party again, railing against U.S. involvement in the war: “Every whale that spouts is not a submarine,” he intoned. “The 3,000 miles of ocean” was “still protection,” a buffer between the United States and contentious Europe. Dewey spoke of the New Deal’s “temperamental inability to follow a straight road toward a national goal.” Robert Taft was a possibility, the name Taft being the one many Republicans believed most likely to beat the name Roosevelt. The delegates split over Dewey and Taft, just as Davenport and Willkie had predicted on Long Island the summer before.

Still, what the delegates talked about was that by now Willkie-for-president clubs across the nation had swelled to almost five hundred in number. The novelty factor that had benefited the Roosevelt team for so long now served the Republicans. In 1940, a year when delegates could still change their allegiance at the convention, they did. Dewey won the first ballot, but only by a plurality. A majority was necessary. He led the second, and the third. Willkie led the fourth, but with insufficient votes. From the galleries and the floor, delegates and guests shouted “We Want Willkie!” The final ballot, and the only one with enough votes for a successful nomination, went to Willkie. The very exhilaration of the Willkie nomination—and the fact that he had beaten such long odds—now made the man seem invincible. From the convention on, every day, it seemed clearer that Willkie would fare better than Landon had.

Other observers at the time and especially later emphasized the differences between Willkie and Landon, or Willkie and other Republicans. Willkie’s candidacy now was about the war; though he, like Roosevelt, shifted position from time to time, Willkie was emphatically not an isolationist. Unlike the Liberty League types, Willkie was able to show that free market ideas were innately American common sense. As a vice presidential candidate he had accepted
the nation’s highest-ranking Republican, Senate minority leader Charles McNary.

The Willkie-McNary campaign produced short film clips for movie theaters. One, featuring Willkie and McNary amid the corn in a field, sought to demonstrate his understanding of the farmer (and presumably the farmer subsidy). Another publicized the economic costs of higher taxes and the importance of freedom (this one featured the ringing of the cracked Liberty Bell). The theme in many of his speeches was the protection of freedom and growth in the United States. With more than one in ten Americans still out of work, the argument was compelling.