Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (68 page)

Domestic allotment was controversial even among farmers, and in order to get the farm leaders on board it was balanced by other initiatives. For decades farmers had wanted the federal government to purchase surplus crops and market them overseas; such a provision was written into the Roosevelt bill. Farmers pleaded for debt relief, arguing that interest rates that had been reasonable before the depression were killing them now; the Roosevelt program promised help on debt, albeit vaguely.

C
URTAILING PRODUCTION
would tend to raise farm prices, but not as fast or surely as increasing the money supply. Diehard populists like Oklahoma Democrat Elmer Thomas contended that every other effort would be wasted unless the president did something about money. Roosevelt’s farm bill passed the House in mere days and by an overwhelming margin—315 to 98. But Thomas stalled its progress in the Senate by proposing an amendment authorizing the president to expand the money supply by remonetizing silver, redefining the relationship between the dollar and gold, or reissuing the kind of fiat currency—“greenbacks”—that had circulated during and after the Civil War.

Roosevelt had known that the money question would come up, but he had hoped to keep it separate from the farm issue. The Thomas amendment made this impossible—as Thomas knew it would. The Oklahoma senator felt an obligation not merely to farmers but to the people of America generally. “No permanent relief is possible until the masses have buying power,” he declared. The way to give them buying power was to put money in their hands.

On this point opinions differed—as vigorously as they had since Bryan and McKinley slugged it out over silver in the 1890s. Hoover had lost the election but still garnered 40 percent of the popular vote. Not everyone who voted for him backed the gold standard with his devotion, but neither did everyone who voted for Roosevelt want him to sever the dollar’s tie to gold. (The million Americans who together voted for Socialist Norman Thomas or Communist William Foster presumably had less reverence for gold than Republicans or many Democrats, but one could never be sure.)

Elmer Thomas’s maneuver compelled Roosevelt to take a position on money sooner than he had intended. Roosevelt accepted the Thomas amendment, noting, however, that it only
authorized
the president to devalue the dollar. It did not
require
him to do so. “Purely discretionary” was how Roosevelt, speaking at a press conference, characterized his prospective power to expand the money supply. The Thomas amendment provided various methods of achieving inflation. “I do not have to use any of them,” Roosevelt said.

He wasn’t opposed in principle to inflation. On April 5, before the Thomas amendment came to a vote in the Senate, Roosevelt employed his new authority under the banking act to order private possessors of gold to surrender their yellow metal for currency. “The chief purpose of the order,” he explained, “is to restore to the country’s reserves gold held for hoarding and the withholding of which under existing conditions does not promote the public interest.” Roosevelt failed to specify, in the moment, just
how
his gold seizure would serve the public interest; several years later he was more forthcoming. “This order served to prevent the accumulation of private gold hoards in the United States,” he said. “It served as a means for further strengthening our banking structure and preventing the possibility of a recurring threat.” So far so good, and so innocuous. What followed was more controversial and was what the president kept quiet at the time. “It was the first step also to that complete control of all monetary gold in the United States, which was essential in order to give the government that element of freedom of action which was necessary as the very basis of its monetary goal and objective.”

The administration’s “monetary goal and objective” proved to be a managed currency, one freed of the constraints of gold. The gold order of April 5 was the first step; Roosevelt’s acceptance of the Thomas amendment two weeks later was a second. “Congratulate me. We are off the gold standard,” he told his economic advisers. Some of them sighed with relief; others spluttered with indignation. Lewis Douglas, the president’s budget director, was among the latter. “This is the end of western civilization,” he prophesied, only partly in black jest. Will Woodin lamented, “What’s a secretary of the Treasury to do when he’s presented with a fait accompli?” Roosevelt explained that his acceptance of the Thomas amendment was tactical. “He said that the reason for the amendment was that unless something of this sort was done immediately, Congress would take the matter in its own hands and legislate mandatory law instead of permissive,” James Warburg, an adviser to Woodin, recalled.

Roosevelt may have overstated the hazard of a congressional diktat, but the result of the Thomas amendment, which passed the Senate in slightly revised form, and the House shortly thereafter, was to augment the president’s power over the money supply. As an indication of what he would do with the added power, he issued an executive order on April 20 forbidding the export of gold without license from the Treasury. More permanently than anything till now, Roosevelt’s embargo cut the dollar adrift from gold. The president subsequently defended this action as “designed for the purpose of gaining for the American dollar freedom—freedom at home from the threat of instability, and freedom abroad for the beginning of a new realignment to the other currencies of the world.” But this was a rhetorical cloak, and a thin one at that. The freedom that interested Roosevelt was his own freedom to revalue the dollar in keeping with his broader designs for the political economy as a whole.

The Thomas amendment broke the impasse on the farm bill, to the discomfiture of conservative Republicans. Joseph Martin of Massachusetts thought the bill gave entirely too much power to the administration. “When you send out this army of tax gatherers to tell the farmer what he can plant and what he can sell, you are well on the road to Moscow,” Martin declared. Michael Hart of Michigan cited a comment by Rex Tugwell, years earlier, that Russia’s experiments in agriculture held lessons for America. Hart rejected the professor’s latest brainstorm, the farm bill, saying, “I am not going to follow communism.” James Beck of Pennsylvania thought a different country provided an apter analogy. “The only argument in favor of this bill is that it is an emergency proposition,” the Republican representative said. “That is a most damnable thing, and in Germany, with the same excuse, they are voting power today to Hitler.”

Yet the dissenters were a small minority. The farm bill passed the Senate on a vote of 64 to 20. The measure the president signed on May 12, after reconciliation of the House and Senate versions, created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which supervised the domestic allotment program. The fight in the Senate over the money question had pushed the initial implementation of the program well into the growing season and produced precisely what Roosevelt had hoped to avoid: the deliberate destruction of crops and livestock in the name of the new federal program. Roosevelt recognized that paying farmers to do nothing would be controversial enough, but paying them to plow up cotton and kill pigs and pregnant cows, while hunger still threatened the land, could be a public relations disaster. As things happened, the administration weathered the storm, chiefly because farmers were desperate for anything that would relieve their plight. But the AAA never entirely got out from under the cloud that shadowed its birth, and when critics of the New Deal adduced evidence against Roosevelt’s programs, they often started with those dead pigs.

25.

R
OOSEVELT’S REMARK, DURING THE SUMMER OF
1932,
THAT
H
OOVER’S
harsh treatment of the Bonus Army had sealed the president’s defeat in the election left something obvious unsaid: that the veterans would be back, to confront Hoover’s successor. And so they were, in the spring of 1933. Most had been chastened by their defeat the previous summer; many showed the added strain of another several months of unemployment and hardship. Yet all were hopeful that a new and presumably more compassionate administration would give them a more sympathetic hearing.

The reception Roosevelt gave them differed completely from Hoover’s. The president treated them not as potential revolutionaries but as honored guests. He ordered a camp prepared for them across the Potomac in Virginia and issued a special executive order to cover the cost of tents, latrines, showers, and mess halls serving three square meals a day. While he declined to meet with them personally—“You know,” he said in answer to a press conference question whether he would visit the camp, “I have been working really day and night; I don’t believe I can get off”—he did the next best thing. Eleanor Roosevelt had followed the vets’ story for months; one afternoon Louis Howe asked her to take him for a drive. He needed to get out of the White House, he said, and a tour through the countryside would do him good. As it happened—as Howe and Roosevelt had arranged—the tour took them to the vets’ camp. “I was rather surprised,” Eleanor recalled afterward. She was even more surprised when Howe announced that he was going to stay in the car. She must go talk to the vets by herself.

It was a brilliant touch. Ten months earlier Douglas MacArthur had led an armored column against the vets; on this afternoon Eleanor Roosevelt entered the camp alone. “Very hesitatingly, I got out and walked over to where I saw a line-up of men waiting for food,” she remembered. “They looked me over curiously, and one of them asked my name and what I wanted. When I said I just wanted to see how they were getting on, they asked me to join them.” Word that the First Lady was in camp spread rapidly, and the vets all gathered around. They gave her a tour of the camp, showing it off despite the day’s rain and the season’s mud. She shared their midday meal in the mess hall and spoke about how she had visited the front in 1919 and witnessed what they and their comrades had been through. “I never want to see another war,” she said. “I would like to see fair consideration for everyone, and I shall always be grateful to those who served their country.” She led the old soldiers—many of whom in fact were little older than her sons—in songs, including “There’s a Long, Long Trail.” She utterly disarmed them emotionally. “Good luck!” they shouted as she walked back to the car. “Good-bye and good luck to you!” she answered. One vet remarked afterward, still amazed: “Hoover sent the army; Roosevelt sent his wife.”

R
OOSEVELT ALSO SENT
jobs. Eleanor’s visit, besides foreshadowing the peculiar effectiveness the Roosevelt team of Franklin and Eleanor would develop, bought the president time to deal with the vets, by means of the New Deal reform that was closest to his heart. On March 14 Ray Moley relayed a query from Frances Perkins regarding a relief issue that had come before the new labor secretary. The president didn’t answer the question at once. “Instead, he began to describe an idea to which, he said, he had given a lot of thought and which he’d formulated to his satisfaction only the night before,” Moley remembered. “It was the stunning idea of putting an army of young men, recruited from the unemployed, to work in the forests and national parks.” Roosevelt directed Moley to outline a program.

Stunning though the idea might have been to Moley, it was hardly original. Various states, including Roosevelt’s New York, had put young men to work since the onset of the depression, as had certain foreign countries, including Germany and Italy. The Italian model of human organization was already unsavory and the German version would grow odious before long, but they and the state plans demonstrated what governments could do to mobilize the unemployed toward socially constructive ends. Roosevelt had promised something along these lines during the campaign and been ridiculed by the Republicans for utopian excess. But now that he was president, he moved to implement the concept. He summoned members of his cabinet to meet with congressional leaders; together they conceived a program that would enroll unemployed young men and send them off to the woods.