Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (57 page)

Roosevelt envisioned a realignment of the parties, with himself leading the progressives of both existing parties into a new party not unlike that which Uncle Ted had headed in 1912. “I’ll be in the White House for eight years,” he told Rex Tugwell during the campaign. “When those years are over, there’ll be a Progressive party. It may not be Democratic, but it will be Progressive.” This prospect was one reason he had refused to sit on his lead during the campaign, why he continued to press forward long after victory was certain. He wanted to win a personal victory that clearly eclipsed the victory of the Democrats, so that he—rather than the Democrats in Congress—could set the agenda for his presidency. He had yet to reveal just how progressive his policies would be, in part because he hadn’t yet decided. But he was certainly more progressive than the southern mules who would try to dominate the Senate, and more progressive than big-business apologists of the party’s neo-Cleveland wing.

He was far too canny to tip his hand to any but the most trusted insiders. He certainly didn’t inform Hoover, who left their White House meeting thinking Roosevelt had agreed to the calling of the debt commission. Such, at any rate, was what Hoover told Henry Stimson afterward. The secretary of state had expected little from the Hoover-Roosevelt session. “My chief fear is the attitude in which Hoover is approaching the meeting,” Stimson recorded in his diary. “He has allowed himself to get so full of distrust of his rival that I think it will go far to prevent a profitable meeting.” Hoover’s initial reaction after the meeting suggested that Stimson had been too pessimistic. “He told me that they had spent most of their time in educating a very ignorant, and as he expressed it, a well-meaning young man. But they thought they had made some progress. He told me that Roosevelt had promised to come out in favor of the President’s and Mills’ plan.”

In this belief Hoover issued a statement urging Congress to establish the debt commission. Roosevelt responded the next day with a statement of his own, rejecting the commission approach. “My view is that the most convenient and effective contacts can be made through the existing agencies and constituted channels of diplomatic intercourse,” Roosevelt said. Nor should the president even consider forgiving any of the debt. “Existing debt agreements are unalterable save by Congressional action.”

Hoover was furious—“very much excited,” in Stimson’s words. The president determined to bulldoze ahead regardless of Roosevelt. Citing the “grave world economic situation,” the president announced that he would, on his own authority, appoint a commission to examine the debt question, along with related issues—related in Hoover’s mind, at any rate—of currency fluctuations and disarmament. The connection to currencies was obvious enough. The depression had forced several countries off the gold standard, including, most ominously, Britain in 1931. The consequent cheapening of the currencies of the gold-less governments gave their exports an advantage in American markets. The League of Nations had proposed a world economic conference to negotiate an adjustment of currencies, of trade, and of other matters relating to the world economy. Hoover enthusiastically supported the conference, but preparations and complications had pushed its scheduled convening beyond his departure from office. Debt questions were supposed to be excluded from the world conference, at the insistence of the American government, which adopted the position that these were bilateral matters between the United States and its debtors. Many observers considered this stance a charade, for it strained the imagination to think that a conference on world economics could ignore one of the fundamental features of the world economy. But it provided Hoover reason to go ahead with discussions of the debts, to get those out of the way before the conference convened.

The disarmament question related to the economic questions in that arms cost money that most governments found in short supply. If the governments of the great powers—the ones that had agreed to the restrictions of the Washington Conference of the previous decade—could arrange to extend those restrictions, they might all improve their economic prospects without, they hoped, jeopardizing their security.

Hoover’s announcement of the appointment of the debt commission was both a response to the developing crisis and an effort to force Roosevelt’s hand. “Serious problems have now arisen, and we are bound to recognize and deal with them,” Hoover declared. To wait until March 4 would risk irreparable damage to the American economy and that of the broader world. “I propose, therefore, to seek the cooperation of President-elect Roosevelt in the organization of machinery for advancement of consideration of these problems.”

As Hoover intended, his announcement put Roosevelt in the uncomfortable position of either acquiescing in the announced policy or defying the president of the United States on a matter declared by the president to be essential to American welfare. Hoover was convinced of the correctness of his position, and he couldn’t believe that Roosevelt would risk the opprobrium that would follow a failure to lend a hand in this moment of peril.

He underestimated his rival. Or perhaps he overestimated the regard in which the American people still held him and his judgment. Had Hoover not been so overwhelmingly rejected at the polls, Roosevelt might have hesitated to cross him publicly on a matter of such weight. But Roosevelt recognized that his political authority, if not yet his legal authority, outweighed Hoover’s. On the same day that Hoover delivered his message to Congress, Roosevelt telegraphed the White House a rejection of Hoover’s approach. “It is my view,” he said, “that the questions of disarmament, intergovernmental debts, and permanent economic arrangements will be found to require selective treatment”—in contrast to the unified approach called for by Hoover. A debt commission continued to be a bad idea. The administration might reasonably conduct surveys of the debt question, but “these surveys should be limited to determining facts and exploring possibilities rather than fixing policies binding on the incoming administration.” The world economic conference should be kept separate from the debt and disarmament questions. “I recognize, of course, a relationship, but not an identity. Therefore I cannot go along with the thought that the personnel conducting the conversations should be identical.” The president’s proposal, at bottom, ignored the disparity that still existed between the two men. “It would be unwise for me to accept an apparent joint responsibility with you when, as a matter of constitutional fact, I would be wholly lacking in any authority.”

This one sentence summarized what everything came down to. Hoover wanted Roosevelt to share responsibility for policies over which he had no authority, and Roosevelt refused. The problem was inherent in the extended interregnum specified by the Constitution. But it was exacerbated by the distrust between Hoover and Roosevelt. Hoover sincerely believed that the policies Roosevelt espoused would ruin the country; the Republican president hoped to preempt those policies by locking Roosevelt into a framework of international commitments and expectations. Roosevelt naturally resisted. The voters had selected him and rejected Hoover; the president’s eleventh-hour efforts amounted, in Roosevelt’s view, to nothing less than a subversion of democracy, besides being wrongheaded on their merits.

O
N
J
ANUARY
2, 1933, Roosevelt found himself out of a job. Some observers had wondered why Roosevelt didn’t resign as governor months earlier, to free himself for the campaign and the transition. Rex Tugwell put the question to Basil O’Connor, a personal and professional friend of Roosevelt’s. “The best reason,” O’Connor answered, “is that he’s poor.”

Tugwell expressed surprise, and O’Connor explained. Roosevelt wasn’t poor by the standards of ordinary people, but he was poor by the standards of his class. The Roosevelts were an “extravagant family,” O’Connor said, and “not one of the lot ever thought of money except to spend it.” Sara Roosevelt still held the purse strings, and she didn’t hesitate to tighten them when she saw fit. Roosevelt’s lifestyle, starting with the ordinary expenses of servants, multiple homes, and travel, and compounded by the extraordinary costs associated with his disability, required a large and constant cash flow. His salary as governor didn’t cover the bills, but combined with income from his own portion of his father’s estate and from Eleanor’s inheritance, and with Sara’s dole, it allowed him to get by. To surrender that salary prematurely was too much to ask. O’Connor guessed that when Roosevelt handed over the governorship at the beginning of January 1933, he might have to borrow money to avoid cutbacks in his standard of living. Besides, the governor’s job included the governor’s mansion, which was a good place from which to run a campaign or direct a transition. The town house in Manhattan was too small, and the estate at Hyde Park too posh. At Hyde Park he’d have credibility problems berating Hoover and the Republican leadership for coddling the rich. The governor’s house in Albany wasn’t exactly spartan, but it belonged to the people and came with the post to which the people had elected Roosevelt.

Yet on January 2—January 1 being a Sunday—he didn’t have a choice. Roosevelt handed the house and the post over to Herbert Lehman. “In taking leave of you, my friends, my neighbors, and my associates, after four years in Albany, I could not fail to have many regrets at the parting,” he said. But he would carry his New York experience with him. “To maintain a government of definite action founded on liberal thought has been my aim.” So it would continue to be. “The crisis has brought new problems and, at the same time, new possibilities.” Roosevelt promised to keep New York in his thoughts while he served the country as a whole. “I shall have a friend in Albany,” he declared, looking at Lehman, “and he will have a friend in Washington.”

R
OOSEVELT HAD FRIENDS;
he also had enemies. This was something comparatively new in his experience. During his first fifty years—he had reached the half-century mark almost simultaneously with his announcement of his candidacy in January 1932—people had sometimes considered him shallow, even supercilious. More than a few had envied his inherited wealth and family connections, although the envy diminished after he contracted polio. A comparative handful had been bruised by his ambition. But almost no one worked up sufficient antipathy to consider him an enemy. He simply wasn’t that important.

Things changed with his nomination. During the campaign the Republicans characterized him as a dangerous radical. His “forgotten man” speech gave rise to charges that he was fomenting class warfare. His call for national planning conjured the specter of socialism. Soon the antipathy would escalate into visceral hatred; much of America’s upper crust would hiss at “that man” in the White House.

In February 1933 one person carried the hostility to murderous lengths. Roosevelt left Albany following the inauguration of Governor Lehman and headed south. He visited Washington for another unproductive meeting with Hoover and proceeded to Warm Springs, for rest and recreation. En route he toured the Tennessee Valley; at Muscle Shoals in northern Alabama he hinted at great plans he had for harnessing the Tennessee River “from the mountains of Virginia down to the Ohio.” After a week at Warm Springs, he traveled to Florida, where he embarked at Jacksonville on a cruise aboard the yacht of Vincent Astor. The cruise recalled his house boating days on the
Larooco
and carried Roosevelt and the other passengers to Miami on February 15. He spoke very briefly to the mayor and assembled guests, including the visiting mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak. Roosevelt praised the fishing while grumbling good-naturedly that he had gained ten pounds in as many days. “That means that among the other duties that I shall have to perform when I get north is taking those ten pounds off.”