Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (40 page)

Yet when his physical progress failed to keep pace with his hopes, he recognized that his political comeback would have to wait a while longer, and he rededicated himself to the advancement of the Democratic party as a whole. The party needed his help, badly. During the 1920s the Democrats’ paralysis grew worse than ever. The current source of the trouble, or at least its most obvious manifestation, was the Ku Klux Klan. The twentieth-century Klan was an ecumenical update of its Reconstruction-era predecessor; it targeted not only African Americans but Catholics, Jews, immigrants, feminists, communists, and anyone else who challenged its members’ narrow notions of conservative values. The modern Klan spread far beyond the Old South, planting active chapters in such previously unlikely locales as Indiana and Oregon. The Klan tipped political races in several states and was influential in getting Congress to pass the first comprehensive immigration control measure, in 1924. A Klan parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington in 1925 featured thousands of hooded, white-sheeted members.

The rise of the Klan complicated the politics of the Democratic party, aggravating the divisions among the party’s eastern, southern, and western wings. The eastern Democrats, who embodied the machine politics of the big cities, were conservative economically, being generally supportive of banks and other big business; friendly to immigrants, on whom they had depended politically for decades; and wet, urging repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. The southern Democrats were the heirs of the post-Reconstruction “Redeemers” and were the current strongest column in the Klan. They looked on New York as the source of most evil in America, with Wall Street and the Lower East Side haunting their dreams about equally, the former on account of its control of the nation’s commerce, the latter for furnishing refuge to Catholic and Jewish immigrants. New York was also the home of the speakeasies, which the southern Democrats—dry to the last Baptist—considered dens of iniquity. The West was the wild card in the Democratic deck. The western Democrats numbered many fewer than the Easterners or the Southerners, but they potentially held the balance between those two groups. The Westerners were the party radicals on economic issues, having absorbed the message of Populism during the 1890s and never forgotten it. Western farmers felt the pain of the continuing postwar agricultural slump and demanded relief, relatively undistracted by such other issues as race and immigration. On Prohibition the Westerners were predominantly dry.

Each segment of the party had its champion in 1924. Al Smith was the darling of the Easterners, having lived down his Tammany past to become, in his second term as New York governor, a persuasive spokesman for clean, efficient government. Catholic and wet, Smith symbolized the cosmopolitan tolerance on which the eastern Democrats prided themselves. Oscar Underwood appealed to Southerners by virtue of his Alabama roots and residence. His name on the tariff reduction act of 1913 still reminded southern farmers of his devotion to their cause, as against that of Wall Street—and against many of the eastern Democrats. Yet Underwood hoped to reach the rest of the party, and presumably the rest of the country, by roundly denouncing the Klan. He went so far as to declare the Klan a mortal threat to democracy and the most important issue facing the party, and he demanded that other candidates join him in condemning the organization. William McAdoo, the former Treasury secretary, who had relocated from Washington and New York to California—for personal reasons, he said, but really to distance himself from Tammany Hall—was the favorite of the West.

Smith, as a Catholic target of Klan vituperation, had no difficulty accepting Underwood’s challenge and denouncing the Klan. But McAdoo demurred. Having grown up in Georgia during the era of the first Klan, McAdoo considered the second edition comparatively harmless. Moreover, with Underwood on record as opposing the Klan, parts of the South were suddenly in play. If McAdoo could finesse the Klan issue—neither endorsing the Klan, which could ruin his chances in the nation as a whole, nor repudiating it, which would cost him southern support—he might carry the 1924 convention. On a visit to Georgia he issued a statement regarding the Klan: “I stand four square with respect to this and I stand four square with respect to every other organization on the immutable question of liberty contained in the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States, namely freedom of religious worship, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right of peaceful assembly.” A leading Klan official, apparently after communicating privately with McAdoo, applauded this statement as perfectly acceptable to the organization. The Klansman might have gone farther had he not feared that an open endorsement would be used against McAdoo. But the message to the Klan rank and file was clear: McAdoo is with us in spirit.

This was what worried Roosevelt, who would have supported fellow New Yorker Smith anyway but now considered McAdoo’s Klan connection a formula for electing Republicans for another six decades. Until the 1920s Roosevelt had never thought deeply or systematically about the future of the Democratic party or its place in American national politics. His first few years in government had been consumed with New York state politics, and during most of his time in the Wilson administration the Democrats had been the ruling party, a condition unconducive to serious reflection about the future. But after the defeat of 1920 Roosevelt turned his mind to long-term strategy. He recognized that Wilson’s success had been a fluke, the beneficiary of a Republican rift that probably wouldn’t be repeated in Roosevelt’s lifetime. The Republicans had been the normal majority party since the Civil War, and if the Democrats hoped to break the GOP’s hold on power, they would have to reconfigure and reposition themselves.

As a first step, they needed to decide what to keep and what to reject of their Wilsonian inheritance. Wilson’s had been an unusual administration, in that it had begun with an overwhelmingly domestic orientation and ended obsessed with foreign policy—indeed, obsessed with a single item of foreign policy: the League of Nations. Roosevelt understood that any obsession was unhealthy, but he remained committed to the internationalist principles of the League, and he believed that a judicious educational effort by the Democrats could win them support at the expense of isolationist Republicans. “I am not wholly convinced that the country is yet quite ready for a definite stand on our part in favor of immediate entry into the League of Nations,” he wrote James Cox in 1922. “That will come in time, but I am convinced we should stand firmly against the isolation policy of Harding’s administration.”

As a modest first step toward this goal, Roosevelt headed a committee to create an endowment honoring Wilson and the principles of the League. Ill health—first Wilson’s and then Roosevelt’s—complicated the fund-raising, but by the time Wilson died, in 1924, the Wilson Foundation had collected more than $700,000 and was beginning to sponsor activities relating Wilson’s beliefs to current affairs.

More directly, Roosevelt addressed the crux of American skepticism on international affairs: article 10 of the covenant of the League of Nations, which committed signatories to the defense of one another against external aggression. The skeptics contended that this article unconstitutionally stole war-declaring power from Congress and war-making power from the president. Wilson’s explanations in 1919 hadn’t seriously dented this conception, and subsequent efforts by lesser League advocates hadn’t either. Roosevelt knew better than to try; instead he advocated rewriting the offending article. In response to a contest organized by Edward Bok, the longtime editor of
Ladies’ Home Journal,
to generate proposals for means of fostering world peace, Roosevelt drafted a plan for an updated and improved version of the League of Nations. Roosevelt’s version would be called the “Society of Nations,” in recognition, he explained, “that public opinion in the United States is, and will be for some time to come, sufficiently hostile to the present formula of the League of Nations to preclude any use of the old name.” The Society’s membership would be similar to the League’s, except that it would include the United States. Its structure would differ in giving more power to a permanent executive committee, consisting of the five great powers (the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan) and six rotating members. Decisions would be by a two-thirds majority rather than by the unanimity required of the League. “Common sense cannot defend a procedure by which one or two recalcitrant nations could block the will of the great majority,” Roosevelt explained. Most significantly for Americans, article 10 of the League covenant would be diluted dramatically. In place of the guarantee that the League would “preserve as against external aggression” the independence and territory of member states, Roosevelt’s draft specified that members would “undertake to respect” one another’s sovereignty and borders. And in the event of violation, the Society would merely “make recommendations” as to appropriate responses.

In the end Roosevelt declined to enter his League revision plan in Bok’s contest. Eleanor had become a member of the committee evaluating the entries, and rather than ask her to recuse herself he simply shelved his plan. Perhaps he had second thoughts about going public with his proposal at a time when any mention of the League risked triggering an isolationist backlash. Yet he mentally filed away his thoughts, as he had been filing away political reflections for years, to await a more propitious time. And when that time arrived he would sponsor a successor to the League that looked very much like his Society of Nations.

Meanwhile he concentrated on issues where he thought progress
was
possible. Though the Harding administration eschewed involvement in European affairs, in matters pertaining to Asia and the Pacific it was less diffident. Charles Evans Hughes, Wilson’s adversary in 1916 and now Harding’s secretary of state, brought representatives of the leading naval powers to Washington, with an eye toward curtailing an escalating arms race and establishing a framework for security in the Pacific. The Washington Conference opened on Armistice Day 1921; it generated the ordinary effusions of goodwill and, over the next three months, an extraordinary series of treaties pledging the great powers to unprecedentedly self-denying behavior. The United States, Britain, and Japan consented to reduce their navies and to refrain from fortifying their Pacific possessions. They agreed to arbitrate disputes, to respect the status quo in the Pacific, and specifically to honor the territorial integrity of China.

Roosevelt attempted to build on Hughes’s accomplishment. In the summer of 1923 he published an article in
Asia
magazine asking, “Shall We Trust Japan?” He answered that Americans should do so and that the Washington Conference gave them reason to believe they could. The Washington system engaged Japan’s honor, which Japan’s leaders were loath to besmirch. More to the point, the naval limitations largely eliminated Japan’s ability to threaten China or shake the status quo. America itself was still more secure. “Even if Japan in 1914 had any false notion that she could threaten us either through Mexico or by direct invasion of the Pacific Coast,” Roosevelt said, “it is safe to say that her strategists have now tacitly abandoned such ideas.” He added, as one who knew something about positioning ships and other naval assets: “As long as ten years ago naval experts said that a fleet crossing a wide ocean from its home base must of necessity lose from a quarter to a third of its fighting force. If that judgment was true ten years ago, then the principle is even more true today; for the addition of two new dimensions, under water and in the air, to the fighting area has made the protection of the capital ship—super-dreadnought or battle cruiser, the fundamental fighting unit—a much harder task than it was then.”

O
N THE ISSUE
of greatest interest to voters—the health of the economy—the Republicans appeared unbeatable. Farmers continued to suffer from low prices, high debt, and unrealistic hopes of a return to the flush years of the war, but city dwellers—who, according to the 1920 census, for the first time outnumbered their rural compatriots—were doing very well. The hiccups of the postwar transition had given way to a period of robust growth. Consumers spent the piles of money they had saved during the war, when military production had crowded out consumer goods. Topping the lists of must-have items were new cars. “The paramount ambition of the average man a few years ago was to own a home and have a bank account,” a small-town banker observed. “The ambition of the same man today is to own a car.” Henry Ford’s Model T remained the most popular model; in 1920 the Tin Lizzies came off the assembly line at Ford Motor’s monster River Rouge plant in Detroit at the rate of one per minute. Half the cars in the world were Fords. A growing part of the other half consisted of the many models gathered under the General Motors umbrella and marketed with uncanny adeptness by GM chief Alfred P. Sloan.