Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (66 page)

R
OOSEVELT’S STUDY
included a desk by the door to the bedroom. Here he occasionally read but more often worked on his stamp collection. He had acquired his first stamps as a boy, and he added to his inventory each time he and his parents traveled overseas. When friends or relatives wrote home from abroad, he saved the stamps. His circle of philatelic sources expanded gradually as he matured and exponentially after he became president. He inquired of the State Department what it did with the envelopes containing mail from foreign governments and was told that most were thrown away, although the stamp collectors on the department’s staff rescued the rare specimens. He indicated that he would like some of the good ones held for himself. Thereafter he received a weekly package from the State Department, delivered by courier each Saturday. He would spend much of that day and often part of the next examining the new items, investigating their origins, and inserting them in his albums. He supplemented these free additions with purchases made through agents and at auctions. His tastes grew more expensive over time, until he decided he’d have to specialize. He chose the Western Hemisphere and devoted himself to the stamps of Central and South America. But dignitaries from all over the world, once apprised that the president liked stamps, would bring him the best of their countries’ postal art, and he never turned the gifts down.

When he wasn’t working on his stamps, he often played solitaire. He preferred a two-deck variant with ten cards showing. He called it “Spider,” for reasons no one could remember. He played by himself, though he enjoyed company while he worked his way through the decks. Missy and Grace sometimes played double solitaire beside him; they would play and chat while he smoked and played silently.

R
OOSEVELT’S
W
HITE
H
OUSE
day typically began a bit past eight. Arthur Prettyman would bring breakfast and a stack of morning newspapers. Roosevelt scanned the front pages and read the editorials of the papers, which generally included the
New York Times
and
Herald Tribune,
the
Washington Post
and
Times-Herald,
the
Baltimore Sun,
and the
Chicago Tribune.
Later in the day he would peruse clippings compiled for him by the White House staff and still later would examine the major evening papers readily available in the capital: the
New York World-Telegram, Journal American,
and
Sun
and the
Washington Evening Star
and
Daily News.
Most of the time he read the opinions of the editors with the practiced calm of the career politician. Occasionally, however, something struck him as unusually outrageous. “It’s a damn lie from start to finish,” he would bellow, tearing the offending piece from its page and handing it to Steve Early. The president’s press secretary would deal with the matter himself or remind Roosevelt to address the issue at his next press conference, if he hadn’t by then thought better of doing so.

Breakfast and the papers required about an hour. At nine thirty Early, Louis Howe, and one or more of the assistants who joined the administration—including, over time, Marvin McIntyre, Edwin “Pa” Watson, Jimmy Roosevelt, and William Hassett—would come in to discuss the day’s schedule and any difficulties it might entail. Sometimes a member of the cabinet with a particularly pressing problem would arrive and be shown in. Less frequently the president would receive members of Congress in his bedroom.

The official day began at ten thirty. Roosevelt, having dressed and shaved, would take the elevator to the first floor and be wheeled to the Oval Office. If it was a Friday he would meet with the press. The balance of the morning was typically filled with appointments. Visitors arrived on the quarter hour, but the schedule often fell afoul of Roosevelt’s inability to keep his visitors—or, more commonly, himself—from talking too long. Pa Watson or Grace Tully would stand at the door looking cross; Roosevelt would ignore the signal or take it as the excuse to send the visitor along.

Roosevelt’s morning lasted until one, when he ate lunch at his desk. If Henrietta Nesbitt, the head of the White House staff and the dictatress of the president’s diet, was in a good mood, he would get something he liked, perhaps calf’s liver and bacon, or creamed chicken, followed by chocolate pudding or pie. More often he made do with hash and a poached egg.

If it was a Wednesday, the afternoon would include a press conference. The alternation between morning conferences on Friday and afternoon sessions on Wednesday was designed to ensure that neither the morning papers nor the evening papers had a regular advantage in reporting breaking news from the White House. More meetings would ensue—the cabinet typically convened on Thursdays—followed by correspondence in the late afternoon. Quite often Roosevelt would simply sign letters Missy had drafted. When he opted to compose letters himself, Grace would generally take the dictation, as Missy didn’t like to. Grace recalled Roosevelt’s style:

When the President was deep in thought during dictation, he would frequently tap his fingers on the arm of his chair. But when his mind was made up on a phrase or a course of action his customary gesture was to stretch out his arms and place his hands flat on the top of his desk. “Now I’ve got it.” That was the gesture of finality. Often while dictating he would push his chair back a bit, grab hold of a trouser leg at the knee, swing the leg over his other knee, and fold his hands. Occasionally he would drop both arms and swing them by his chair while he dictated.

The afternoon’s work would end with a swim in the pool constructed in the White House basement with funds from supporters who wanted the president’s physical therapy to continue or with a rubdown by the masseur the navy assigned to the president. Roosevelt would meet with Ross McIntire, the White House physician, for symptomatic treatment of his chronic sinus condition.

The cocktail hour came next, followed by dinner. Formal dinners were held in the public rooms on the first floor of the White House; informal dinners took place in the family dining room on the first floor or in the study upstairs. After dinner Roosevelt might prepare a speech or tidy up some additional correspondence. Sometimes he worked on his stamps or watched a movie. His favorite actress was Myrna Loy. He kept his preference in film stars within the White House family, in part because Loy was said to have been the favorite actress as well of John Dillinger, the notorious bank robber who was shot to death in Chicago after leaving a Loy film. Roosevelt tried to get her to visit the White House, but on the one occasion when she did so, he was out of the country. “Well, what was she like?” he asked upon his return.

24.

A
S
A
MERICANS TURNED OFF THEIR SETS FOLLOWING
R
OOSEVELT’S
first radio address, they appreciated that their fate was in different hands than it had been in eight days before. The comparative few who could knowledgeably assess the mechanics of the new banking system understood how little it differed from the old one. The banks remained in private hands. They continued to rely on the confidence of depositors. The government supervision involved in the reorganization was modest in scope and temporary in duration. One observer who thought the president should have gone further remarked, “The president drove the money changers out of the Capitol on March 4th, and they were all back on the 9th.” Ray Moley, speaking from the inside, thought the result had taken longer but was hardly more earth-shaking. Wearily congratulating himself and Will Woodin—and of course Roosevelt—he asserted, “Capitalism was saved in eight days.”

On March 12 that remained to be seen. But what was coming into plain view was that capitalism was under new political management. From the shifting tones of the campaign, it had been impossible to tell whether Roosevelt would be the scourge of capitalism or its savior. The evidence of his first eight days suggested that he was more the latter than the former. Alongside the bank bill, Roosevelt sent to Congress a request for authority to slash the federal budget. Shaking his finger at the deficits accumulated and projected by the Hoover administration’s budgets—a total of $5 billion by the end of 1934—Roosevelt declared, “With the utmost seriousness I point out to the Congress the profound effect of this fact upon our national economy. It has contributed to the recent collapse of our banking structure. It has accentuated the stagnation of the economic life of our people. It has added to the ranks of the unemployed.” These evils would continue until drastic economies in government were effected.

Roosevelt’s call to cut federal spending was intimately connected to the emergency bank law. The new currency issue was to be based on government bonds, which like everything else in economic life would be less valuable—and in this case less inspiring of the confidence essential to the bank plan—the more of them there were. Roosevelt signaled his purpose in the name he gave to the spending measure: “A Bill to Maintain the Credit of the United States Government.”

But Roosevelt contended that economy in government spoke to a larger issue. “Too often in history, liberal governments have been wrecked on the rocks of loose fiscal policy. We must avoid this danger.” Putting the government’s house in order was the prerequisite to everything else. “National recovery depends upon it.” Before long the image of Roosevelt as budget slasher would appear quaintly ironic, even ludicrous. But at the outset of his administration he was deadly earnest, and perfectly plausible. Later generations would equate liberalism with largesse in government, but that was chiefly the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt. Members of Roosevelt’s own generation, the children of the Progressive era, were as likely to view government spending with concern as with favor. The progressives complained that government spent too lavishly on business and other private interests, whether directly through subsidies of such endeavors as railroad construction or indirectly via the tariff. Postwar liberals looked askance at the tariff and at the trade-promotion activities of Hoover’s Commerce Department, whose very headquarters—“that great marble building which is facetiously called in Washington the ‘Temple of Fact Finding,’ which cost the people considerably more than the Capitol of the United States,” Roosevelt said during the campaign—symbolized the government’s care and feeding of capitalism.

In any event, when Roosevelt asked for authority to cut the federal budget, people took him seriously. The primary complaint, in fact, of those who questioned the measure was that he would cut too deeply. Roosevelt contended that the fall in prices since 1929 justified a corresponding decrease in the salaries of government workers, and he requested the authority to cut federal pay by 15 percent—including his own pay, which would fall from ninety thousand dollars per year to seventy-five thousand. Not surprisingly, the thought of smaller salaries alarmed civil servants and political appointees and all of those who depended on them in every village, city, and state of the Union. No less dismayed were the armies of military veterans currently or prospectively on government pensions. Veterans were to American politics after the Civil War and again after the World War what the elderly would be to American politics in later decades (again courtesy of Roosevelt): a well-organized constituency with narrow, clearly articulated interests. After each of the big wars, and to a lesser extent after the Spanish-American War, the vets had persuaded Congress to expand the size of pensions and the ranks of the eligible. Presidents sometimes vetoed the measures—Grover Cleveland in the 1880s, Hoover in 1932—but the veterans always came back.