Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (46 page)

P
ART
II

The Soul of the Nation

1929 
 1937

18.

O
F THE NEW INDUSTRIES OF THE 1920S, NONE SO CHARACTERIZED THE
decade as advertising. Publicizing products had been an aspect of marketing for many years, but during the 1920s advertising took on a life and identity of its own. The American economy had lately crossed the historic divide between the age of scarcity, when the principal problem of economy was producing enough, and the age of surplus, when the problem was producing too much. For the first time in American history—and the first time in human history on such a broad scale—people had to be persuaded to consume all they collectively could produce. This was the challenge of America’s “New Era,” as its propagandists dubbed it, and it was the mission of advertising. “In the past, wish, want, and desire were the motive forces of economic progress,” Herbert Hoover declared to a conference of advertising executives. “Now you have taken over the job of creating desire.” Bruce Barton, the high priest of advertising, asserted, “Advertising is the spark plug on the cylinder of mass production…. Advertising sustains a system that has made us leaders of the free world: The American Way of Life.” Barton didn’t claim his craft was beyond reproach; nothing human was. “If advertising sometimes encourages men and women to live beyond their means, so sometimes does matrimony. If advertising is too often tedious, garrulous, and redundant, so is the U.S. Senate.” In other words, advertising was as human as love and as American as democracy.

Every modern industry, or at least every successful modern industry, heeded the advertising imperative, with many making products into their own advertisements. “Bathtubs appear in stylish shades,” one observer wrote. “Dishpans are no longer plain Cinderellas of fire and ashes; following a wave of the hand by the fairy godmother—style—they now appear resplendent in blues and pinks…. Automobiles change with the calendar. Last year’s offerings are made social pariahs; only this year’s model is desirable until it, in turn, is made out of fashion by next year’s style. Furniture, clothing, radios, phonographs, tumble from the fertile minds of scientists and designers and…drown the sales possibilities of products that already stagger with infirmity at the age of one year.”

The New Era battened on the institutionalized optimism that was advertising’s stock-in-trade—on the confidence that this year’s products would be better than last year’s, that this year’s sales would be greater than last year’s. Growth had always been the key to success in the American economy, but for most of American history the essential growth was growth in supply; in the age of scarcity, demand took care of itself. The titans of the nineteenth century—John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie—had focused on production, correctly confident that whatever they produced in oil and steel the American economy would consume. But as the country industrialized more fully, demand became the crux of the economic question, till in the New Era it emerged as the sine qua non of continued prosperity. If demand remained robust, the economy would thrive. If demand flagged, for whatever reason, the economy would slump. And demand depended on confidence: on the conviction, among others, that incomes would rise to support increasing purchases of all the goods the economy could produce.

Confidence could be self-fulfilling. If merchants expected sales to rise, they would expand their inventories by sending larger orders to suppliers, who would hire extra workers and invest in additional plant. The workers, with paycheck-swollen wallets, would become the customers for the merchants’ expanded inventories, in a virtuous circle with no obvious end.

Confidence was even more essential in another signature economic activity of the New Era: the buying and selling of securities. Wall Street had been the heart of the nation’s financial sector since the mid-nineteenth century, but in the decade after the World War the buying and selling of stocks and bonds became a national obsession. “Wherever one went, one met people who told of their stock market winnings,” a broker explained. “At dinner tables, at bridge, on golf links, on trolley cars, in country post offices, in barber shops, in factories and shops of all kinds.” A financial reporter, describing a popular form of pooled investing, declared, “Hardly a week now passes but a new investment trust appears on the horizon.” Before the war, the stock market had been a province of perhaps half a million investors; during the 1920s the province swelled to country size, comprising some fifteen million men and women who hoped their shares of the booming economy would make them rich. Stories of heretofore improbable success abounded: of the broker’s valet who heeded his boss’s tips and cleared a quarter million in profit, of the registered nurse whose bedside manner toward her well-informed patients earned her a quick thirty thousand, of the widow who took a flier in copper and landed the cash to pay off her mortgage, of the struggling young man who plunged into Niles-Bement-Pond and resurfaced with enough money to retire in style. The masters of investment became household words and cultural heroes; speculators like Samuel Insull, Jacob Raskob, and Billy Durant took the place on the front pages formerly occupied by industrialists Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Henry Ford. Everyone knew about bulls and bears; the terminology of the stock market infiltrated the larger language. To “sell something short” had originally meant to bet on a fall in price and carried no connotation of the outcome of the bet; during the 1920s, when short sellers consistently lost money—since everything was going up—it came to imply a mistaken judgment of something’s value.

Hard figures supported the euphoria that surrounded the stock market. The bull market of the New Era began in 1922 with the Dow Jones industrial average bumbling along below 80; by January 1929 the Dow had hurtled past 300. The future promised to be even brighter than the past. “Business is entering the new year upon a high level of activity and with confidence in the continuance of prosperity,” one respected forecaster averred. A prominent banker declared, “All major indications point to a prosperous coming year.”

Those indications included the recent election of a president who was every businessman’s dream and who embraced the New Era with enthusiasm. “One of the oldest and perhaps the noblest of human aspirations has been the abolition of poverty,” Herbert Hoover proclaimed in accepting the Republican nomination. “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us. We have not yet reached the goal, but, given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”

As voters overwhelmingly concurred that Hoover—rather than Al Smith—was the man to lead them farther into the New Era, Wall Street jubilantly seconded the opinion. The “Hoover market” of the autumn of 1928 lifted share prices to record levels. And in his inaugural address Hoover promised more of the same. “We have reached a higher degree of comfort and security than ever existed before in the history of the world,” he said. “Through liberation from widespread poverty we have reached a higher degree of individual freedom than ever before…. We are steadily building a new race—a new civilization great in its own attainments.”

“I
T LOOKS LIKE
I will have a man-sized job on my hands for the next two years,” Roosevelt wrote Archie Roosevelt, Theodore’s son, shortly after the 1928 election. Much of the job would consist of dealing with the Republicans who controlled the New York legislature and who, after the broad Republican sweep, were in a singularly unaccommodating mood. They considered Roosevelt’s narrow victory a fluke that would be rectified at the first opportunity and ought to be subverted till then.

Roosevelt addressed the hostile group in his inaugural speech on January 2, 1929. Agriculture remained the conspicuous exception to the boom of the 1920s; farm prices and incomes continued to lag. Roosevelt noted this and called for measures to elevate farm income till rural life became as materially attractive as city life. Hydroelectric power had been a contentious issue in New York state politics for years; the heart of the discord was whether hydropower sites should be developed publicly or transferred to private hands. Roosevelt came down firmly on the side of the former, telling the lawmakers that control of promising sites should “definitely remain in the people.” He advocated new laws protecting labor, including a “real eight-hour day and forty-eight-hour week” for women and children (the existing laws were often flouted), the extension of workmen’s compensation to cover occupational diseases (and not just accidents), the creation of a board to advise on minimum and equitable wages, the restriction of the use of injunctions by management against unions in labor disputes, and the establishment of an expert commission to advise on old-age security.

The chamber didn’t warm while Roosevelt was speaking. He hadn’t expected it to, and his conclusion conveyed promise but also a hint of warning. “The verdict on our relationship that I most desire from you,” he said, with a bared-teeth smile, “is that I have at least been fair and reasonable and friendly.”

The Republican lawmakers filed out of the assembly chamber frowning and proceeded to ignore essentially everything Roosevelt had said. He wasn’t surprised; in their position he might have done the same thing. But rather than hector his opponents, he devoted himself to cultivating his allies—or those who might become his allies. No Democrat could expect to govern New York without the aid of Tammany Hall, and though Roosevelt realized he would never enjoy the sidewalk credibility of Al Smith, he reasoned that he might bring Tammany around to his view of the needs of the state. Two weeks after his inauguration he headlined Tammany’s annual speakers’ bureau dinner. With nary a hint of past enmity, he thanked his “old friends” of Tammany for their support in the recent election. And he called upon the speakers’ bureau, in particular, to carry the worthy task forward. “Upon you rests the responsibility for the education of the voter in the aims and principles of the Democracy, not only of the city and the state but of the nation.”

Because the theme of the evening was political speaking, Roosevelt offered advice on this essential art. He reminded his listeners that in the early days of the republic, effective oratory had been crucial to political success. “Elections were won or lost, parties were driven out or swept into power entirely as the public speakers on one side or the other proved most able and convincing,” Roosevelt said. “It was the golden day of the silver tongue. With rare exceptions, the great public man had also to be classed as a convincing orator.” Things had changed as newspapers spread; voters learned to gather their information and take their cues from the daily papers. A powerful pair of lungs and a resonant set of vocal cords didn’t hurt the prospective office-holder, yet they were no longer necessary. The best speakers were often not the candidates themselves but the rally men, the functionaries appointed to whip up enthusiasm at gatherings of the party faithful.