Penguin History of the United States of America (156 page)

8
In justice to the railroads it must be recorded that the rates they charged were not really extortionate, and fell throughout the period. The real crime of the financiers who manipulated and mismanaged the roads was that they neglected all considerations of safety, maintenance and technical efficiency in their struggle to keep afloat. The farmers, however, got little or no benefit from the decline in railroad charges: other middlemen took up the slack, as it were, and the farmers continued to pay through their noses for getting their crops to market.

9
In rounded figures: 1860, wheat $1-50 per bushel, cotton 15 cents per pound; 1890, wheat 87 cents per bushel, cotton 8 cents per pound.

10
See above, p. 270.

11
By this time the Redeemers were also sometimes known as ‘Bourbons’ because, like the French royal family after 1814, they were thought to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. No doubt they were also fond of Bourbon whisky.

12
This is rhetoric: American judges do not wear ermine, only seemly black gowns.

13
An allusion to the Pinkertons.

14
Bryan, at thirty-six, was only a boy in the political world; but it is worth pointing out that he was two years younger than Theodore Roosevelt, four years younger than Woodrow Wilson, neither of whom, in 1896, had a national reputation.

15
Vachel Lindsay,
Collected Poems
(New York, 1937 edn), pp. 97–8.

1
See Rudyard Kipling,
Captains Courageous
(London, uniform edn, 1899), PP- 84, 120, 191 and, especially, 87: ‘I tell you, Harve, there ain’t money in Gloucester ‘ud hire me to ship on a reg’lar trawler. It may be progressive, but, barrin’ that, it’s the putterin’est, slimjammest business top of earth.’

2
And in the 1980s was US Steel’s only hope of recovery from the combined curse of shrinking markets, outdated plants and incompetent management.

3
See below, p. 451.

4
Published in 1909, this book explained Theodore Roosevelt’s career to himself. It is intelligent, well informed and almost unreadable.

5
Theodore Roosevelt on America’s greatest novelist: ‘a very despicable creature, no matter how well equipped with all the minor virtues and graces, literary, artistic, and social’; a ‘miserable little snob’. Roosevelt could not forgive James for settling in England; he blushed to think that he was once an American, and thanked heaven when James became ‘an avowedly British novelist’.

6
Journalists now wear the term
muckraker
as a badge of honour, but Roosevelt meant to be thoroughly insulting. Bunyan’s muckraker was content to rake to himself ‘the Straws, the small Sticks, and Dust of the Floor’, blind to the celestial crown that was offered him (
Pilgrim’s Progress
, Part 2). Roosevelt, like many politicians since, wished that journalists were less fond of exploring the seamy side of politics.

7
The Anthony Amendment was named after its author, Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), sometime abolitionist and temperance reformer, who became the most effective American suffragist of the nineteenth century. Modelled on the Fifteenth Amendment, it states simply that ‘The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any States on account of sex. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.’

1
These stories had an immense impact on American opinion, although many were almost ostentatiously false. For instance, a woman in San Francisco told her friends that she had actually seen Belgian children whose hands had been cut off by the Huns. She admitted later, ’Of course, I hadn’t, but it was true, and that was the only way I could convince them.’

2
This incident makes an ironical counterpoint to the Lancashire cotton famine during the Civil War, when English workers patiently endured mass unemployment until the victory of democracy ended the Northern blockade and Southern cotton could flow to market once more. Officially, the people of the cotton South may have believed that in 1914 Britain was fighting for democratic civilization; but they were disinclined to endure any inconvenience on that account.

3
Even in such a matter as immigration, Britain now resembled America. For instance, there had been an enormous inflow of Irish and Jews during the nineteenth century.

4
I have always liked G. K. Chesterton’s melancholy comment: ‘The world cannot be made safe for democracy, it is a dangerous trade.’

5
It is notable that none of their wars has ever been allowed to prevent the Americans from holding elections.

6
The importance of this fact, from the German point of view, may be understood by comparing it with the situation that emerged from the Second World War.

7
Though it should be noted that there was another school of thought which demanded the stiffest possible terms to punish Germany for her crimes.

8
J. Hampden Jackson,
Clemenceau and the Third Republic
(London, 1946), p. 215.

9
This actually happened. The Reparations Commission fixed the sum due at $66,000,000,000; in 1921 it was reduced to $44,000,000,000; in the end Germany (who repudiated her liabilities during the Depression) paid no more than $5,000,000,000 or so. Allowing for inflation, and the vastly greater destruction of the later war, this compares very reasonably with the $1,000,000,000 which France had to pay Germany as indemnity for the Franco-Prussian War.

1
It is only fair to add that Harding toned down his alliteration markedly after he became President: he was upset by the merciless ridicule it had brought on him from people like the journalist H. L. Mencken.

2
The real average was some hundreds higher, because of a contradiction (typical of its muddles) within the 1924 system itself.

3
It was this provision of the Act that led Japan to declare a day of national mourning when it became law.

4
But it now seems clear that Nicola Sacco was indeed guilty.

5
Nobody has ever doubted that Daugherty was a crook of some sort, but he covered his tracks very astutely and was acquitted at his trial (probably through bribing a juryman). Airs Harding destroyed six-sevenths of her husband’s papers. So it is not surprising that even Harding’s accomplished biographer, Francis Russell, has been unable to establish the truth.

6
Perhaps the most appealing is the one about the lady who found herself next to him at dinner. ‘Mr President, I have bet my friend that I can make you say more than three words.’ ’You lose.’ And there was the reporter who asked him about a sermon he had just been hearing. ‘The minister preached on sin.’ ‘What did he say?’ ‘He was against it.’

8
The establishment of the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and the Budget) was the most lasting achievement of the Harding administration. It meant that for the first time the President was able to control the expenditure plans of the government. No longer did the departments go straight to Congress; everything now had to be channelled through the White House. It was a very important accretion of Presidential power.

7
Its only link with the Bull Moose party was its name.

9
Though it could be argued that an even more characteristic figure of the period was Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York, a corrupt, engaging scamp, whose rule was chiefly notable for His Honour’s taste for pretty girls, and for the affability with which he greeted distinguished visitors to the city, such as Lindbergh. Another notable mayor was Big Bill Thompson of Chicago, famous for incompetence, collusion with Al Capone, and for threatening to poke King George V on the snoot should His Majesty ever come to the Windy City.

10
The population of the United States was estimated at about 122 million. Most of the nine million investors owned only small pieces of the action. But they bought all they could: for which they and their dependants (who have never been counted) would in due course suffer acutely.

11
This quotation, and almost all the other details in this paragraph, have been gratefully lifted from Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts,
The Day the Bubble Burst
(Ilondon, I979)PP. 373 – 84

12
‘Trading partner’ is a post-1945 cliche. The phrase was not in use during the twenties and thirties, because American businessmen were blind to the truth it expresses.

13
This describes Hoover best in the autumn of 1932, at the end of the gruelling election campaign of that year; but he got into that state only because of three years of ceaseless overwork.

14
He did not travel again in a plane until the Second World War.

1
A good example of his patience was the question of the White House cook. A favourite of Mrs Roosevelt, she did not believe in pampering her employers. The President only made occasional brief expostulations; and the food continued filthy throughout his four administrations.

2
The Twenty-First Amendment became law on 5 December 1933.

3
To be sure, under Presidents Carter and Reagan the ideal of a balanced budget would once more be held up to reverence, in spite or because of the stupendous deficit which continued to grow under both men. FDR never in his wildest nightmares could have supposed that budgets might repeatedly be unbalanced by more than $100 billion. In the 1990s, Congress and President Clinton made strenuous and fairly successful efforts to balance the budget again, at least in the short term. They were helped by a surge of great prosperity. Whether this rectitude will last for long remains to be seen (1999).

4
Considering that the bald eagle is the American national emblem, and that ‘blue’ is the demotic synonym for ‘sad, weary, melancholy’, the symbol was grievously apt for 1933 in a way that General Johnson cannot have intended.

5
It is important to realize that this side of the NRA programme was essentially one of cartelization: the world was to be made safe and agreeable for big business; the tendency towards oligopoly was to have the protection of the law. This was what Morgan and the other great capitalists had wanted before the First World War: the NRA was the realization of their dream. Unfortunately, as so often happens, the dream, once realized, began to show its weaknesses.

6
Characteristically, the employers impudently tried to persuade the N R A that the minimum wage provisions of the cotton textile code made a banning of child labour unnecessary. It was this sort of thing that drove Clarence Darrow to declare after an NRA conference that he had not realized before how much the rich loved the poor.

7
For instance, the NIRA explicitly declared war on monopolies; but friends and critics within and without the NRA could never decide whether on balance the agency was more of a help or a hindrance to monopolists.

8
Art. 1. sec. 8: ”The Congress shall have Power… To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.’

9
Hughes, the former Secretary of State, was Chief Justice from 1930 to 1941.

10
A charming and characteristic incident of the New Deal years was the musical revue
Pinsand Needles
, created and staged by members of the ILGWU. It had a long ran on Broadway; no one was allowed to stay in the cast for more than a few weeks, and eventually a special performance of the show was mounted at the White House for President Roosevelt. The hit song was ‘One Big Union for Two’.

11
‘Clout’: a slang word in American politics, deriving particularly from Irish-American circles in Chicago. It originally meant corrupt influence at City Hall. Thus one might say of a bootlegger, ‘He won’t be charged – he has too much clout.’ Nowadays it just means political power or influence. ‘Logrolling’: help me to roll my log and I’ll help you roll yours. Thus, in the thirties, urban representatives voted for farm bills, and farming representatives voted for urban reforms.

12
The average net income per farm went from $945 in 1929 to $304 in 1932. The realized net income of all farmers went from $6,274,000 to $1,922,000.

13
Those who can stomach a grossly enriched prose will find a powerful account of three poor farming families in James Agee’s
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
, first published in 1941, superbly illustrated by Walker Evans’s noble photographs.

14
Harold Ickes always believed that Hopkins gave his chief agency a name (Works Progress Administration) with initials confusingly like those of the PWA so that he could get credit with the public for Ickes’s achievements; Hopkins’s biographer, who details the battle between the two men, does not dismiss the idea (Robert E. Sherwood,
The White House Papers of Harry L. Hopkins
, London, 1948, Vol. i, p. 71).

15
Sherwood,
Hopkins
, Vol. i, p. 49.

16
General George Marshall on Hopkins’s wartime activities.

17
One of the smaller but useful reforms of the New Deal was to move the date of the Presidential inauguration back two months, from March to January. Never again would there be a long interregnum such as the two which nearly destroyed America, in 1860–61 and 1932–3.

18
FDR’s thesis was to be vindicated in the 1980s, when largely because of actuarial miscalculations (people living longer than expected) the insurance system was nearly bankrupt. Even so conservative a President as Ronald Reagan dared not solve the problem by reducing pensions.