Forgotten Man, The (49 page)

Besides, Willkie did not merely criticize the New Deal. He tried to show where it served well, and where it diverged from that common sense. In a speech before the American Newspaper Publishers Association, Willkie argued it was important that governments “leave men free.” He also argued that the United States had to think about freedom in Europe, that the United States had “a vital interest in the continuance of the English and French way of life.” At the end of the Republican convention, the situation on the domestic front seemed clear. Willkie was for limiting the New Deal; FDR was for expanding it.

At his own party convention in Chicago, Roosevelt tried to shift the terms of the debate. He said that he stood for the businessman but also stated, via the party platform: “We have attacked and will continue to attack unbridled concentration of economic power and the exploitation of the consumer and the investor.”

It was a difficult moment for him and his old brain trusters. Earlier that year the
Town Hall Meeting of the Air
—the same in which Willkie appeared—had aired a show about Steinbeck’s theme, the rural migrant. The title was “What Should America Do for the Joads?” Tugwell had been one of the debaters, but when it came to present solutions, he fell silent. The next day the
New York Times
commented on his vagueness: “Mr. Tugwell was the only one of the speakers who did not have a concrete suggestion for alleviating measures.” Chase for his part was also outside, consulting at the Temporary National Economic Committee, an office created by Roosevelt
during the 1938 downturn to study monopolies. (Chase was now advocating the establishment of a permanent PWA.)

But now people knew the president. After reelection, he might turn back to his old planning friends, and he might do something else—the unpredictability was the only thing you could be sure of. Again, Roosevelt had a response to this: to anchor extant constituencies. The president at the last minute traded John Nance Garner, his conservative vice president, for farming’s powerful friend, Henry Wallace of the Agriculture Department. The move showed he understood the threat of Willkie’s wager. In July he told fellow Democratic strategist James Farley, “You know, if the war should be over before the election and I am running against Willkie, he would be elected.” The country seemed wild to know everything about Willkie—right down to the fact that his given name was really Lewis Wendell Willkie, and not Wendell Lewis. On August 3, George Gallup, the pollster, reported that Willkie would have the edge over Roosevelt if the election were held that day. Willkie had already decided to go back home to deliver his acceptance speech in Elwood.

He took his time writing it. It was the most final, and strongest, rebuttal to the progressives that had yet been offered. Before a crowd estimated at 200,000, and with the weather 102 degrees in the shade, Willkie asked the public to think about what it meant to be an American liberal. Was a liberal merely a left progressive? Or was a liberal someone who believed in liberalism in the classic sense, in the primacy of the individual and his freedom? Willkie railed against Roosevelt’s “philosophy of distributed scarcity.” And he argued, speaking of both the United States and Europe, that it was “from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power…

“American liberalism does not consist merely in reforming things. It consists also in making things. The ability to grow, the ability to make things.” Redistribution was a loser’s game: “I am a liberal because I believe that in our industrial age there is no limit to the productive capacity of any man.” Growth, not government action, would lift the United States out of its troubles: “I say that we must substitute
for the philosophy of distributed scarcity the philosophy of unlimited productivity. I stand for the restoration of full production and reemployment by private enterprise in America.”

Listeners yelled their approval. Anne O’Hare McCormick, the columnist who had accompanied the labor delegation on its visit with Stalin in Moscow and had profiled Roosevelt at Hyde Park after his nomination eight years before, now produced a giant feature that the
New York Times
titled “Man of the Middle West.” A new group, Democrats for Willkie, hailed him as “this leader of true liberalism.” And in a way he was that leader—the liberal of individual freedoms rather than the leader of group rights. From Yale, Irving Fisher, ebullient as ever, now wrote to offer his services. In an essay arguing against a third term for Roosevelt, Fisher recalled that Theodore Roosevelt had promised not to run in 1908, and had kept that promise. When it came to his old friend FDR, Fisher argued that the election of 1940 was dominated by “two sinister facts. One is that he has built up a political machine. The other is that he has put millions of voters under obligation to him.” Fisher had managed to get a meeting with Willkie in July and wrote in his diary, “A red letter day, not because it’s the Fourth, but because I saw Willkie.” Willkie, unlike Roosevelt, was “pressed for time,” Fisher noted—“His desk was a terrible mess.” Still, Fisher felt he had connected with him.

Another supporter of Willkie’s turned out to be Judge Joseph L. Dailey of New Mexico. Dailey had been the head of the western division of Tugwell’s Rural Rehabilitation Service. Now he was lunching with Willkie. Gallup’s math put Willkie ahead of Landon’s record in Maine, a fact that some observers took to mean that Maine would, through Willkie, win back its old role as a signal state. Willkie’s campaigners were ordering up buttons that read “Learn to Say: President Willkie.”

ELWOOD PROVED TO BE THE HIGH POINT
of the Willkie campaign. This was partly because, like most independents, Willkie was less equipped for a general election than a campaign primary. The
marriage between him and the Republican Party as it existed in 1940 was an awkward one, and it made Willkie a weaker candidate. Willkie, after all, was a hawk when it came to Europe, and liked free trade; the party platform took the opposite positions. Willkie liked the private sector, and McNary liked it less so. Observers began to underscore Willkie and McNary’s differences: McNary was from Oregon, a big government power state—indeed, a large dam would be named after him only a few years later. McNary had fought against steps to build the arsenal of the Allies. But policy was not the end of it, for there were also differences even in speaking style. Willkie talked everywhere, whereas McNary had a record as the silent senator in his quarter century in the Senate. Though Willkie justified his differences with McNary as part of politics—only a broad coalition could win in the United States—the disparity between them was so great as to make the ticket illogical.

The Republican film clip depicting Willkie and McNary as men of the soil—“Willkie and McNary Know Their Farming”—was a bit ridiculous, when people thought about it. Willkie had his farms in Rushville, Indiana, but he was a self-confessed “conversational” farmer—he managed his properties, mostly, by telephone. As for McNary, he was more a man of the farming business than a farmer; he had, for example, worked on increasing the commercial prospects for the Imperial prune. Two weeks after Willkie’s Elwood speech, Henry Wallace gave his own acceptance speech in Des Moines, Iowa. The new vice presidential candidate was showing the country, in effect, that the Democrats had a real farmer on offer as well.

Willkie compounded his problems by softening his positions in other areas. Suddenly he was talking about supporting organized labor, a position that seemed at odds with his arguments against “vested interests” earlier in the year. Very late in the campaign, in a moment of pure political angling, John L. Lewis endorsed Willkie over the radio, railing against “Caesar”—Roosevelt. Herbert Hoover wired his congratulations to Lewis the same night.

Lewis’s move seemed brilliant tactically but it made no sense when it came to policy, and therefore helped neither Willkie nor
Lewis. Nor could the fact that Willkie used the opportunity of a speech before a labor audience in Mellon’s Pittsburgh to strike out at Frances Perkins. Promising to name a labor secretary from among organized labor itself, Willkie added, “And it will not be a woman, either.” Perkins later reported that Roosevelt consoled her, saying: “That was a boner Willkie pulled.” Why, Roosevelt asked, reasonably enough, “did he have to insult every woman in the United States?”

There was a logic to Willkie’s inconsistency that went beyond the blind desire to win. It was the logic of his, and Root’s, 1940 wager. The German liberal or Social Democrat in him—and the American civil rights advocate—continued to watch Europe. That war needed stopping. With the determined ambition of a candidate, Willkie decided that he would subordinate domestic concerns, shift his positions, all in the name of winning control of U.S. foreign policy.

Here Roosevelt still worked from greater advantage. To start with, he had his interest groups lined up. The new Hatch Act notwithstanding, he was still spending on jobs across the country. Forty-two million American workers were now enrolled in Social Security—more than it took to win an election by far—and they looked forward to getting their Social Security payments. Farmers still believed—cheap Willkie McNary advertisements notwithstanding—that Roosevelt would protect them. Roosevelt’s choice of Henry Wallace as running mate was paying off. Nor did many in labor forget that it was Roosevelt whose law had given them the closed shop. “They will vote to continue the New Deal,” said Jacob S. Potofsky of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers at the end of October. “Labor will not scrap its newly won rights because of one man’s personal grudge.” Roosevelt had created the modern farmer-labor coalition, and now it was there for him.

But the real reason Roosevelt started to gain was the coming war. For one thing, it promised yet more spending. The Lend-Lease law would be passed only after the election, but both events and Willkie were already forcing Roosevelt in the campaign period to make clear that he would spend to defend the United States and to
help its allies. The downturn was ending. Gross national product was finally approaching the level of 1929, though a comparison was misleading, for now the population was millions greater. The cotton crop for the year looked to be good again. And business activity picked up tremendously in preparation for that spending. Even in World War I, government spending had had a tremendous influence. Business knew that if government was already bigger by so much than it had been in the 1910s, then a coming war would only increase its scale more.

There was another, less discussed factor. Roosevelt truly was doing what Willkie had asked back at the
Town Hall Meeting of the Air
debate in January 1938. He was toning down his rhetoric against business, again, and asking for a truce. In the war, Roosevelt needed a picture of a self-reliant United States, not a weak one. If that meant changing the New Deal, well, of course he would change it. This switch was already evident within the administration. About a year before, for example, Roy Stryker and his photo office had been visited by a German diplomat who wanted to send photos of America’s weakness home to Hitler. Stryker felt a sudden resolve: “He was a very pleasant little Nazi. I had no intention of allowing the record of America’s internal problems to fall into his hands. I had the file clerks show him a wonderful range of things—mountains and rivers and lush fields.”

Now, in 1940, Stryker sent one photographer out at Halloween with the assignment of documenting the opposite of what the team had portrayed in the preceding decade: “Emphasize the idea of abundance—the ‘horn of plenty’—and pour maple syrup over it you know, mix well with white clouds, and put on a sky-blue platter.” The domestic political goal of highlighting trouble now was subordinate to international politics, and everyone, including Stryker, knew it. In 1942, Stryker would be even more direct in his orders to his photographers. They could still photograph the needy but should also take “pictures of men, women, and children who appear as if they really believed in the U.S. Get people with a little spirit. Too
many in our file now paint the U.S. as an old person’s home and that just about everyone is too old to work and too malnourished to care much what happens.”

The old figures whom businesspeople had feared were now ignoring them, or asking them for help. Ickes was focusing on foreign matters; he would shortly begin to manage energy for the president in the war period, teaming up with oil companies rather than attacking them. Hopkins too was hard at work on foreign policy. Reports came out that Hopkins even lived at the White House—he had been there since the spring. Frankfurter’s stay had been about the courts and legislation; Hopkins’s visit focused on the crisis of defense.
Time
readers learned that Hopkins had been aboard when the president had sailed down the Potomac with the navy secretary, touring military facilities and talking about conscription.

Roosevelt knew that he needed more than an economy that looked good. He needed an economy that actually was strong. A war on business and a war against Europe could not happen at the same time. In World War II, as in any war, bigger businesses tended to do well, for they were the ones who became government partners. The smaller ones sometimes suffered—and sometimes didn’t. The nimbler among them found a way to survive or even thrive while serving the war cause. Alfred Loomis, for example, was a great anglophile; he believed that the destruction of Britain was the destruction of civilization. Now he could put to work all the research he had been doing on radar, in the service of beating the Germans. From an antagonist of Roosevelt’s, he turned into a servant.

Another example of this new dynamic in operation—albeit on a very small scale—showed up at Casa Grande. The farmers continued to squabble at the collective farm. It was clear that they might not stay together in the long run. But some of the edge was off. For the fighting was no longer about losses—it was about gains. Nineteen forty was turning out to be a good year. Water flowed from the Coolidge Reservoir, and prices for crops were rising. The management’s hypothesis that livestock was a good idea was proving true.
Though the farmers could not know it yet, 1941 would be even better, showing a profit of $15,791, nearly treble the expected rate, for the cattle. There would be profits in cotton and poultry. After their long wait, the settlers would eventually get a raise, to $65 a month. The concept of settlement still felt wrong, but the edge was off.