Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (73 page)

Fosdick afterward recalled a formal dinner at the White House. Roosevelt shuffled down the long passage from the state dining room to the East Room, where the guests were gathered.

He used a cane and hung heavily on the arm of an aide; and his walk was the slow, painful, contorted shuffle of paralysis. As he approached the door the Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief,” and in a flash I realized with a lump in my throat that this apparently broken man was indeed the chief—with the capacity and magnetism of great leadership, and bearing on his face and in his handsome eyes the mark of confidence and power.

Ray Moley had his own interpretation of the Hundred Days. “None of us close to FDR lived normal lives,” Moley said of the period. “Confusion, haste, the dread of making mistakes, the consciousness of responsibility for the economic well-being of millions of people made mortal inroads on the health of some of us, like Will Woodin and Joe Robinson”—the Senate majority leader—“and left the rest of us ready to snap at our own images in the mirror.” Only the president appeared exempt. “Roosevelt preserved the air of a man who’d found a happy way of life. From March 4th, when he had reviewed his three-and-a-half-hour inaugural parade with every evidence of real enjoyment while Woodin wrestled with the question of how to open the banks, until June 16th, when Congress adjourned, I saw him lose his poise, self-confidence, and good humor but once.” This was in the fight over the budget, when an influential Republican refused compromise. “But for the rest, he was the ebullient, easy, calm man pictured in the Sunday rotogravure sections. This phenomenon, which had seemed remarkable enough during the campaign and banking crisis, now began to take on the appearance of the miraculous. I had, fleetingly, the illusion that Roosevelt had no nerves at all.” Roosevelt astonished Moley with his ability to turn from work to play, and back, with neither pause nor self-consciousness.

What began as a social encounter—say a swim in the White House pool, complete with splashings and duckings—would, with bewildering suddenness, be interrupted by a series of questions on the progress of the railroad legislation. What began as a serious evening’s discussion on the guarantee of bank deposits (which FDR distrusted), and whether or not the administration should get behind the Glass bank bill in view of the fact that Glass had accepted the guarantee of deposits to get support for the rest of the bill, would, long before a decision had been reached, become a leisurely night at home: FDR would be working on his stamp collection and start telling anecdotes of his Wilson days; Mrs. Roosevelt would wander in and out to call his attention to passages in a book that she was reading; the sweet-faced Missy LeHand and Grace Tully would appear with photographs for him to sign; Louis would stick his head in and ask wryly if he’d be breaking into this “important conference” if he told us the story of what he had said to Harold Ickes that morning.

Moley thought Roosevelt’s ability to shift so easily between work and pleasure was one secret of his tirelessness. There were others. “He had the successful executive’s ability to keep his mind clear of details once he had decided on a principle of action, together with a perfect faith that somehow, someone would always be around to take care of details satisfactorily.” Moley noted that the details in question could be quite substantial: whether the CCC should enroll a quarter- or a half-million men, whether the federal budget should be cut by four hundred million or five hundred million dollars. “He had the faculty of emerging from three hours of fifteen-minute interviews exhilarated, where another man would be done in.” This wasn’t because, like Calvin Coolidge, he didn’t talk back to his visitors. “FDR enjoyed himself for just the opposite reason. His visitors didn’t talk back to him. They couldn’t. It was he who called the conversational turns, he who would discourse at length on this or that, he who would catch and hold and visibly delight the caller.”

Moley would change his views regarding Roosevelt’s policies. But he never lost his admiration for the man’s remarkable gifts, including the ability to treat the weightiest subjects with ease and laughter. “In short, he was like the fairy-story prince who didn’t know how to shudder. Not even the realization that he was playing nine-pins with the skulls and thighbones of economic orthodoxy seemed to worry him.”

27.

D
URING THE 1932 CAMPAIGN AND THE TRANSITION THAT FOLLOWED,
when Roosevelt had cast scorn on Hoover’s argument that the causes of the depression lay overseas, he knew he was exaggerating and oversimplifying. He had reasons for doing so, some good and others dubious. The good reasons were that a new president had to start somewhere in tackling the depression and that domestic causes were more amenable to presidential influence than international ones. The foremost dubious reason was that without such exaggeration he might not have become the new president. Roosevelt was neither the first nor the last presidential candidate to convince himself America needed him more than abstract truth did.

Roosevelt’s polio had curtailed his foreign travel; an emergency trip to Europe in 1931, undertaken upon learning that Sara had contracted pneumonia while on vacation, constituted his only overseas journey in nearly fifteen years. But if he had ventured widely he would have seen disturbing signs that the structure of the peace crafted at Paris after the World War was collapsing. Germany had been humiliated by the war-guilt provision of the Versailles treaty and burdened by the open-ended reparations payments, but it hadn’t been crushed; the result was that Germany’s postwar experiment in democracy was almost guaranteed to fail and that Germans would blame their troubles on the Versailles system. The National Socialists certainly did so during the 1920s, under their strangely charismatic and brilliantly shrewd leader, Adolf Hitler. German Communists clumped the Versailles system with a broader critique of international capitalism and bourgeois democracy and squared off to fight the Nazis for control of the German government. As the depression set in, destroying such prosperity as the Germans had managed to achieve under the reparations-and-debt regime, the Communists gained support among the German people. The Soviet Union, the Communists said, was surviving the depression quite well; its socialist political economy should serve as a model for Germany’s own. The millions in Germany’s soup lines found the argument appealing and leaned left. Germany’s business and propertied classes found the argument appalling and leaned right; having to choose, as they saw it, between the Nazis and the Communists, they sided with the former. In January 1933—just as Roosevelt was interviewing potential cabinet secretaries—banker Kurt von Schroeder invited Hitler to his Cologne home, where he promised the support of German industrialists in exchange for Hitler’s pledge to leave their business interests untouched. A short while later Hitler, as head of the now-majority Nazi party, was asked by President Paul von Hindenburg to form a government.

Americans had difficulty taking Hitler seriously.
Time
magazine devoted five amused pages to his accession. “Last week, on the biggest morning of his life,” Henry Luce’s weekly reported in early February 1933, “this pudgy, stoop-shouldered, tooth-brush-mustached but magnetic little man bounded out of bed after four hours sleep, soaped his soft flesh with cold water, shaved with cold water, put on his always neat but never smart clothes and braced himself for the third of his historic encounters” with Hindenburg. The first had occurred the previous August, when Hindenburg had treated Hitler contemptuously. “‘With what power, Herr Hitler,’ growled Old Paul, ‘do you seek to be made Chancellor?’”
Time
reported. “‘Precisely the same power that Mussolini exercised after his March on Rome!’ chirped cheeky Adolf…. ‘So!’ bristled Der Reichspräsident with the air of a Prussian schoolmaster about to squelch an urchin. ‘Let me tell you, Herr Hitler, if you don’t behave, I’ll rap your fingers!’” The subsequent months were as unkind to Hindenburg and Hitler’s rivals as they were to Herbert Hoover, and by January the German president had been forced to accept Hitler as chancellor. But Henry Luce still found the little man and his program mildly ludicrous. He described the “beer-soused Bavarians” who had backed Hitler’s rise to power, labeled the Nazi party “fantastic” (in the sense of embodying Hitler’s fantasies), and declared of the Nazi agenda: “Its program consists of stentorian appeals to every form of German prejudice. Essentially Nationalists and patrioteers, the Nazis insert ‘Socialist’ into their party’s name simply as a lure to discontented workers…. Today it is no exaggeration to state that the Nazi Party is pledged to so many things that it is pledged to nothing…. In so far as it has a doctrine, National Socialism promises the bulk of the German people whatever they want.”

The snickering didn’t last long. Within the month of Hitler’s takeover—and just days before Roosevelt’s inauguration—the Nazis burned the Reichstag, the German parliament building. They blamed the Communists convincingly enough that the government and the German people went along with legislation outlawing the Communist party. On March 5, the day Roosevelt closed the banks in the United States, new German elections gave Hitler’s coalition a majority, which proceeded at once to award the chancellor near-dictatorial powers. In a first flexing, Hitler launched a national boycott of Jewish businesses and Jews in the professions.

Even so, in 1933 Japan appeared more threatening than Germany. Roosevelt had been to Germany several times, and though, like most other Americans, he found National Socialism puzzling, at least he understood the frame of reference within which the Nazis operated. Japan, by comparison, was a cipher. Roosevelt knew what other educated Americans knew: that Japan had modernized during the late nineteenth century by adopting Western technology, that Japan had employed its Western technology against China and then Russia in the long-standing contest for control of Korea and Manchuria, that Japan had fought on the side of the Allied powers during the World War, that Japan had joined the Washington Conference protocols on naval arms limitations. Roosevelt also knew that the Japanese had taken offense at various actions by the Western powers over the years. But he didn’t know—and almost no one else in the West knew, either—how much of the offense was honestly felt and how much was diplomatic melodrama. Were the Japanese
really
upset at the United States because Theodore Roosevelt persuaded their government to accept a reasonable settlement of the Russo-Japanese War? Did American restrictions on immigration sting as badly as some Japanese spokesmen—including the Japanese ambassador to the United States, who warned of “grave consequences” for U.S.-Japanese relations—claimed? Did the refusal of the Paris peace conference to embrace racial equality truly wound the Japanese psyche? Did the lesser tonnage allowed the Japanese navy at the Washington Conference matter to ordinary Japanese?

All Roosevelt could do was ask himself what he would have done in the place of Japan’s leaders. He was a politician; they were politicians, after their fashion. He interpreted the world, for political purposes, in a way that served his interests; he supposed they did, too. He would have cited—and perhaps exaggerated—American sensitivities in explaining to other governments what he could and couldn’t do; he imagined Japanese leaders did the same.

Yet certain aspects of Japanese policy were undeniable. In September 1931, at the behest of the nationalist military officers who increasingly dominated Japanese foreign policy, Japanese troops guarding a railroad across Manchuria claimed they had been attacked by Chinese bandits at Mukden. The Japanese army responded by occupying the rest of Manchuria, converting China’s northeasternmost province—and the one richest in resources essential to industrial development—into a Japanese puppet state called Manchukuo. The speed of the occupation made obvious that it had been planned in advance and that the whole affair had been staged.

The hijacking of Manchuria marked a resumption of the struggle for East Asia. The Japanese apparently guessed that the Western powers, absorbed as they were in their own economic troubles, would do little to hinder their expansion. The West proved Tokyo correct. The League of Nations discussed the affair interminably, and the United States—which was to say, the Hoover administration—merely refused to recognize the independence of Manchukuo. The American policy did not prevent Japan from exploiting the people and resources of Manchuria, but it was better than nothing. Or so Hoover hoped.

Days before Roosevelt’s inauguration, the League of Nations finally acted on the Manchurian question. Although the United States remained outside the League, all the members but one voted to adopt America’s non-recognition policy as the League’s own. Japan should leave Manchuria and return it to China. The sole dissenter to the League vote was Japan, which declared that it would never leave Manchuria—Manchukuo—but would leave the League at once. China was a “fiction,” the Japanese delegate to the League snorted on his way out the door. By this time Japanese troops controlled the entire region north of the Great Wall, which hadn’t kept out invaders when it was built and didn’t seem likely to keep them out now. China—whether fictional or real—lay open to further depredation.