Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (72 page)

The modern Moses had problems akin to those of the original. The closer the promised land loomed, the more restive his followers grew. The rise in prices prompted investors to return to the stock market; in the several weeks after April 1 stocks rose by half. At this point the depression had last longer than any in recorded American history, and it stood to reason—and to Wall Street’s hopes—that the hard times had just about run their course. The innovations the president proposed might be unnecessary, even counterproductive. Roosevelt’s critics gained traction with each day’s rise in the market. “How much longer are we going to continue this delegation of power?” Republican senator Lester Dickinson of Iowa asked. “When are we going to learn our lesson?” William Borah of Idaho declared of the president, “No man can execute all the powers we have given to him.” Even Roosevelt’s allies began to complain. Henry Ashurst of Arizona, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, asserted, “Those senators have read history upside down, or have not read it at all, who do not realize that when you grant power it will not be used as you expect it to be used.”

“There is a revolt in the air in the Congress,” Hiram Johnson remarked in early June. “Men have followed him upstairs without question or criticism. Some individuals have been mute concerning their most cherished ideas in order that they might contribute what little they could in aid of the President’s efforts in this economic crisis. These men have about reached the limit of their endurance.” Johnson visited Roosevelt with a delegation from Congress and witnessed the president himself becoming testy. “He is losing a little of his astounding and remarkable poise, and I rather think a bit of his good nature,” Johnson said. “He wants us out of the way.”

He did indeed. What came to be called the Hundred Days had never been scheduled for that length, or any length. Roosevelt originally thought the special session should conduct a week or two’s business, dealing with matters that simply couldn’t wait until the regular session began the following January, and then recess, perhaps to return for another week or so in the fall. But members of Congress didn’t want to leave and then come back, and consequently Roosevelt thought to let them stay on, perhaps until the end of April or the beginning of May. Yet when the lawmakers proved so amenable to his various suggestions, he kept sending more, and more ambitious, measures, which stretched the session toward the hundred-day mark.

The onset of hot weather, though, in the era before indoor cooling, had always signaled the time to adjourn. A confrontational president might use the heat to extort favors from Congress; Roosevelt had watched Wilson do precisely this in 1913. But a president with Congress on his side typically humored the legislators’ desire to escape. Roosevelt accordingly urged the senators and representatives to wrap up their debates and pass the bills before them, that he might sign the bills and they all go home.

They did so, with greater haste in some instances than in others. The industrial planning bill showed the fingerprints of its many authors; it was, in Moley’s words, “by now a thorough hodge-podge of provisions designed to give the country temporary economic stimulation and provisions designed to lay the groundwork for permanent business-government partnership and planning.” The temporary stimulation took the form of a $3.3 billion appropriation for public works, directed by a Public Works Administration and intended to provide jobs for the unemployed. The groundwork for business-government partnership in planning was the provision for industrial codes that would encourage businesses to cooperate with one another and with labor rather than to continue the free-for-all that had prostrated so many of them.

“In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country,” Roosevelt said on signing the National Industrial Recovery Act on June 16. “It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” This was a radical—even revolutionary—statement, arrogating to government the responsibility for determining which businesses should exist and which not. Heretofore the government had let the market make that determination. Roosevelt elaborated on the new dispensation:

Throughout industry, the change from starvation wages and starvation employment to living wages and sustained employment can, in large part, be made by an industrial covenant to which all employers shall subscribe. It is greatly to their interest to do this, because decent living, widely spread among our 125,000,000 people, eventually means the opening up to industry of the richest market which the world has known. It is the only way to utilize the so-called excess capacity of our industrial plants.

The “industrial covenants” were the heart of Roosevelt’s new order, and they would begin, he said, with a “great spontaneous cooperation” to rehire millions of workers. “The idea is simply for employers to hire more men to do the existing work by reducing the work-hours of each man’s week and at the same time paying a living wage for the shorter week.” This wasn’t Roosevelt’s idea; it was the hostage he had given to the thirty-hour forces in Congress to get the bill he wanted. Roosevelt, like most successful politicians, had a knack for convincing himself of the truth of what served his purposes, but even he almost choked on the phrase “great spontaneous cooperation.” There might be cooperation, and he hoped it would be great, but he knew it wouldn’t be spontaneous. If spontaneity had been possible, the law he had just signed wouldn’t have been necessary.

Roosevelt fiddled the truth on other aspects of the law. He explained that the wage-lifting efforts of any single business, acting alone, would fail. “But if
all
employers in each trade now band themselves faithfully in these modern guilds, without exception, and agree to act together and at once, none will be hurt, and millions of workers, so long deprived of the right to earn their bread in the sweat of their labor, can raise their heads again.” Aside from the archaic language of “guilds”—the American steel industry, the most powerful industry in the world, a guild?—Roosevelt’s assertion that no one would be hurt was demonstrably false. The companies that were undercutting the market would be hurt; they weren’t engaged in their current behavior for the pleasure of it. Then there were consumers, who benefited from the competition among producers.
They
would suffer from the rise in prices the rise in wages would entail.

“Many good men voted this new charter with misgivings,” Roosevelt conceded, in the closest he ventured to an admission of the law’s imperfections. But he quickly added, “I do not share these doubts.” The reason he didn’t—or said he didn’t—was his experience of the World War. “I had part in the great cooperation of 1917 and 1918, and it is my faith that we can count on our industry once more to join in our general purpose to lift this new threat, and to do it without taking any advantage of the public trust which has this day been reposed without stint in the good faith and high purpose of American business.”

Those who were following Roosevelt’s argument must have been scratching their heads at this logical turn. American business had done very little during the previous few years to cause Americans—Democrats especially—to repose trust in its good faith and high purpose. Roosevelt himself had been elected by railing against American business. Moreover, the premise of the new law was that business couldn’t be trusted to act in the public interest without the strong arm of government to enforce acceptable behavior. His analogy to the country’s experience during the World War was problematic, to say the least. The war had been expected to be—and proved to be—brief; no one intended the wartime regimentation of industry to last more than a year or two. Even then, when the regimentation ended and government controls were lifted, the economy suffered severe inflation and labor unrest that made many Americans wonder whether the whole effort had been worth it. Roosevelt’s audience had to wonder—because he didn’t say—whether the new system of “industrial covenants” was to be temporary or permanent. If the former, it might be tolerable. If the latter—all bets were off.

Roosevelt plunged forward. He challenged industry to earn the trust the American people, acting through himself and Congress, were reposing in it. Taking a term from the war era, he warned against “slacker” firms—those that put private interest ahead of the general welfare. Nor was the potential for selfishness confined to single firms. “We can imagine such a thing as a slacker industry.” The American people would be watching.

He challenged labor to do its part. An essential aspect of the new law was section 7a, which greatly facilitated the organizing of labor in many industries. This section alone marked a radical shift in the relationship of the government to industry, for until now government had been either hostile or neutral toward labor’s long struggle to achieve a semblance of parity with management. But with favor came responsibility. “This is not a law to foment discord”—strikes and other forms of labor protest—“and it will not be executed as such. This is a time for mutual confidence and help.”

He challenged the American people. “There is no power in America that can force against the public will such action as we require. But there is no group in America that can withstand the force of an aroused public opinion. This great cooperation can succeed only if those who bravely go forward to restore jobs have aggressive public support and those who lag are made to feel the full weight of public disapproval.”

W
ITH THIS MESSAGE
Roosevelt rang down the curtain on the special session. He sent the legislators back to their states and districts with his thanks for their “sincere and whole-hearted cooperation” and his congratulations for proving “that our form of government can rise to an emergency and can carry through a broad program in record time.”

The program was definitely broad. Congress in the Hundred Days approved fifteen major pieces of legislation, including the Banking Act, which was supplemented at the end of the session by the Glass-Steagall Act, a measure reorganizing the banking system and providing a degree of deposit insurance; the Economy Act, which allowed Roosevelt to rein in spending; the law establishing the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was already enrolling and training scores of thousands of young men; the Securities Act, with its requirements for fuller disclosure of stock issues; the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which made government the guarantor of the health of the nation’s farm industry; the measure creating the Tennessee Valley Authority, as a development agency in its own right and a yardstick for electrical power production; and the National Industrial Recovery Act, which put government in charge of industrial planning and pumped billions of dollars into public works. Other laws provided emergency relief to the poor and jobless, debt relief to farmers, and mortgage relief to home owners. On the authority delegated by Congress—either in 1917 or in 1933—Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard, undoing sixty years of American monetary policy.

It was a breathtaking record, and many members of Congress were convinced they’d need the full six months before the legislature reconvened simply to catch their breath. It was a record, as well, that placed more power—and more responsibility—in the hands of Roosevelt than any peacetime president had ever wielded or borne. “Now that Congress has gone and left him with the framework of an entirely new government system, the President must see that its cogs and shafts work reciprocally,” Arthur Krock observed. “The front wheels of the government engine cannot be permitted to revolve more swiftly than the rear wheels if the vehicle is to get where it is bound. Each administrator must see to it that his assistants pursue a certain policy, and the policy of each group must mesh as a general plan. In the most powerful nation of the world, with 130 millions of people to be dealt with, the labor is Herculean. It is more than that, for the strong man of mythology was pretty dumb. It is Olympian.”

Whether Roosevelt had the stuff of an Olympian remained to be determined. Many of those who had known him before his inauguration and who watched him during the Hundred Days expressed amazement at how much larger he now seemed. Norman Davis and Raymond Fosdick had worked with Roosevelt in the Wilson administration; Davis told Fosdick, after a visit to the White House: “Ray, that fellow in there is not the fellow we used to know. There’s been a miracle here.” Fosdick agreed. “There
had
been a miracle, an intellectual and spiritual metamorphosis induced by adversity and triumph,” he recounted later.

Those lonely years of struggle when, as he told me once, his sole, determined purpose was to move his big toe, had done something to his character—something fine and strong which brought him courage and bold confidence, a depth of penetration and a new self-control. From now on he feared nothing, and he faced the problems of his generation not only with level eyes but with sympathy and imagination.