Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (101 page)

T
HE CONSERVATIVE REVOLT
caused Roosevelt to wonder whether the entire New Deal was at risk. The southern Democrats had always been reluctant reformers, and with the president presumably a lame duck their reluctance had become defiance. It was hardly inconceivable that a Republican president, elected in 1940, would forge an alliance with the conservative southern Democrats and dismantle the New Deal bit by bit—or all at once.

Roosevelt might have retreated in order to consolidate his position. He could have given the conservatives enough of what they wanted on peripheral issues like minimum wages to ensure support for such central programs as Social Security. He could have turned the New Deal in a cautiously moderate direction.

But the president chose a different path. Convinced of both the correctness of his vision for America and the continuing potency of his personal charm, he took the fight to the conservatives. He declared war within his own party. During the late winter and spring of 1938 he directed his most trusted assistants, including his son James, who had taken over some of Louis Howe’s responsibilities, and Harry Hopkins, who was becoming the president’s all-purpose fixer, to identify Democratic primaries where administration support might tip the balance between pro–and anti–New Deal candidates. The White House operatives focused on the South, where conservative opposition was strongest and where segregationist politics guaranteed the general-election victory of whichever candidate won the Democratic primary. They scored an early victory in May in Florida when James Roosevelt proclaimed the administration’s support for Claude Pepper, a New Deal liberal, and Pepper went on to trounce his primary opponent, an outspoken anti–New Dealer.

The president himself kept aloof till the primary season heated up at the start of the summer. In late June he took his campaign to the air. “There will be many clashes between two schools of thought, generally classified as liberal and conservative,” he told a Fireside Chat audience. The liberal school was able to recognize that the novel conditions of modern life necessitated new remedies and ways of thinking; the conservatives were not. The conservative school wanted government to ignore modern problems. “It believes that individual initiative and private philanthropy will solve them—that we ought to repeal many of the things we have done and go back, for instance, to the old gold standard, or stop all this business of old age pensions and unemployment insurance, or repeal the Securities and Exchange Act, or let monopolies thrive unchecked—return, in effect, to the kind of government we had in the twenties.” The question was whether voters would agree with this reactionary position. Roosevelt thought they should not, and, to illustrate his point, he told a story he said came from China. “Two Chinese coolies were arguing heatedly in the midst of a crowd. A stranger expressed surprise that no blows were being struck. His Chinese friend replied: ‘The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.’” Americans ought to take the lesson. “I know that neither in the summer primaries nor in the November elections will the American voters fail to spot the candidate whose ideas have given out.”

It was a risky strategy, causing Roosevelt’s most seasoned political advisers to groan. “The Boss has stirred up a hornet’s nest,” John Nance Garner observed. “The feeling is becoming intensely bitter. It’s downright unhealthy.” Jim Farley told the president directly, “Boss, I think you’re foolish.”

Roosevelt appreciated the risk he was taking. He remembered how Wilson’s appeal for a vote of confidence in the war effort had backfired in 1918; his current appeal for a vote of confidence in the New Deal might backfire, too. He understood that second-term presidents often suffer from voters’ sixth-year itch and that congressional elections often turn on local, idiosyncratic issues. But he considered the stakes sufficiently high to warrant the risk, and he plunged ahead. He toured the country, stopping in states and districts with close races pitting his allies against his enemies. In Louisville he endorsed Alben Barkley over the Kentucky senator’s conservative opponent. In Oklahoma City he told an audience that Senator Elmer Thomas had been “of enormous help to me and to the administration,” and he castigated Thomas’s rival as a perennial naysayer.

In Georgia the “purge,” as Roosevelt’s opponents and much of the press were calling it, grew the most personal. Walter George was a three-term senator who was as solidly planted in the upper chamber as a person could be. He feared neither Republicans nor Democratic presidents. He disdained most aspects of the New Deal, and he didn’t hesitate to vote his disdain. Yet Roosevelt bearded the old lion in his Barnesville den. Speaking to George’s face—and the faces of Governor E. D. Rivers and Georgia’s other senator, Richard Russell—Roosevelt reminded his listeners that he was an adoptive son of their state. He said he had nothing against Senator George as an individual. “He is, and I hope always will be, my personal friend. He is beyond question, beyond any possible question, a gentleman and a scholar.” But he was wrong politically. “On most public questions he and I do not speak the same language.” Roosevelt explained that as a Democratic president he needed the cooperation of Democrats in Congress to carry out the people’s will. “That is one of the essentials of a party form of government. It has been going on in this country for nearly a century and a half.” Roosevelt put two questions to Georgia Democrats as they approached the primary. Was their candidate a fighter for the broad objectives of the party and the administration? And did he honestly believe in those objectives? “I regret that in the case of my friend, Senator George, I cannot honestly answer either of these questions in the affirmative.”

Roosevelt wasted his breath. Georgia voters rejected his advice and returned George to the Senate. South Carolina voters did the same for Cotton Ed Smith after Roosevelt visited the Palmetto State. Maryland voters reelected Millard Tydings over Roosevelt’s opposition.

The president suffered a shellacking that season beyond the failure of his purge. The Republicans picked up eight seats in the Senate and eighty-one in the House. They netted a gain of thirteen governorships, winning with Harold Stassen in Minnesota and John Bricker in Ohio and barely losing with Thomas Dewey in New York, where Roosevelt’s protégé Herbert Lehman clung to office by the thinnest of margins. The Democrats still held the balance in both houses of Congress, but the purge’s failure predictably emboldened southern conservatives in their defiance of the White House. “It’s time to stop feeling sorry for the Republicans,” Jim Farley grumbled.

36.

“T
HERE WERE ONLY TWO PEOPLE WHO STOOD UP TO
F
RANKLIN,”
Eleanor remarked years later to Henry Morgenthau. “You and Louis.”

“No, you are wrong,” Morgenthau replied. “There were three—Louis, myself, and Eleanor Roosevelt.”

The question of who stood up to Franklin became more critical the longer Roosevelt remained in office. Howe, Morgenthau, and obviously Eleanor had known Roosevelt for many years before he became president. They appreciated the growth in his stature and power, but they never lost touch with the ordinary man he had been—and the ordinary man he still was beneath the trappings of office. But Howe died, and Eleanor spent more and more of her time on her own causes: her travels, her lectures, her column. Morgenthau stayed in daily contact with Roosevelt, but his influence was diluted by the many others who laid claim to the president’s time and energy. And nearly all these others knew Roosevelt only as president—as the man who, among other things, could advance or retard their careers, who could bestow or withhold favors.

Harry Hopkins was one of these, and he was conspicuously excluded by Eleanor and Morgenthau from the short list of persons who stood up to Franklin. Eleanor couldn’t decide what she thought about Hopkins. Her heart went out to him when his wife died of cancer in 1937, leaving him bereft and solely responsible for their five-year-old daughter, Diana. Hopkins himself had been diagnosed with cancer, and while doctors, on removing a large part of his stomach, thought they had got it all, no one could be sure. “Just before Christmas in 1938 Mrs. Roosevelt came to our house in Georgetown to see me,” Hopkins later wrote Diana.

At that time I was feeling none too well. I had seen a great deal of Mrs. Roosevelt during the previous six months, and the day she came out she told me she thought I seemed to be disturbed about something, and wondered if it was a feeling that something might happen to me and that there was no proper provision for you. She told me that she had been thinking about it a good deal and wanted me to know that she would like for me to provide in my will that she, Mrs. Roosevelt, be made your guardian.

Hopkins knew the story of Eleanor’s own orphanhood, and he doubtless guessed that her experience had sensitized her to Diana’s situation. He gratefully accepted the offer.

Yet he realized it was much more about Diana than about him. After taking some pains to bring Hopkins into the inner circle of the White House family, Eleanor began to wish she hadn’t. His actions as czar of relief stole headlines she thought should have been Franklin’s. And when he attracted criticism she resented the bad light he brought on the administration. Conservatives repeated endlessly a statement attributed to Hopkins that he forever denied having made but that seemed to summarize the Hopkins attitude toward relief and politics: “We shall tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect.” At every opportunity the conservatives slapped him down. In 1937, amid the uproar provoked by Roosevelt’s court-packing plan, the House of Representatives wrote a rider into the relief appropriations bill, cutting Hopkins’s salary from $12,000 to $10,000. “This was pure spite,” the
Baltimore Sun
asserted, “for what is a saving of $2,000 a year in a job like that? But while the business has no monetary significance, it is highly significant as revealing the emotional state of members. They must hate Hopkins with a frantic hatred when they are driven to do as childish a thing as cutting $2,000 off his salary to express their anger and resentment.”

It was spite, to be sure, but there was something else. After the 1936 election, political handicappers predictably looked to the 1940 race. Most assumed that Roosevelt would be tempted to try for a third term but that, like every one of his predecessors who had felt the temptation, he would resist it. Presumably he would cast his support to a candidate committed to preserving and perhaps extending the New Deal. Vice President Garner was too conservative, besides being a Southerner. Various otherwise likely senators and governors had looked askance at significant parts of the Roosevelt reforms. In effect, only the loyalists were left. Of these, Hopkins was the most loyal and arguably the most able. Hopkins mentally worked through the process of elimination and began to fancy himself presidential material.

Roosevelt didn’t discourage him. In the spring of 1938 he invited Hopkins to the White House for a chat. The conversation commenced with Roosevelt venting the anger he still felt at the conservatives on the Supreme Court. He explained that it had long been tradition for the chief justice, at the start of each autumn session of the court, to call the White House to inform the president that the court had convened. The president would then invite the justices over for a visit. Justice Hughes had been careful to follow the tradition for the first three years of Roosevelt’s presidency, but he had failed to do so in 1936. Roosevelt took this lapse as a conscious affront. “And remember,” he told Hopkins, “this was six months before the court fight started.”

Roosevelt mused about appointments to the court before sidling around to the question of his own successor. He didn’t disqualify himself for 1940, but he described his “personal disinclination” to run again and explained that Eleanor definitely didn’t want him to run. He said the family finances required the replenishment a former president might accomplish but a sitting president could not. Hyde Park was costing his mother more than she was earning in interest and dividends from the family trust.

Roosevelt listed several possible candidates for the Democratic nomination, only to explain why each wouldn’t do. Cordell Hull was too old. Harold Ickes was too crotchety. Henry Wallace and Frank Murphy lacked broad constituencies. Jim Farley wanted the nomination as much as anyone, but Roosevelt judged him the “most dangerous” of the plausible prospects because of his growing disenchantment with the New Deal and his weak understanding of foreign affairs.