Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (76 page)

I’m not crazy about it, but I think I’d go that far. The essential thing is that you impress on the delegation and the others that my primary objective is to raise the world price level. Tell them what our American recovery program is doing to raise prices, relieve debtors, and increase purchasing power. If other nations will go along and work in our direction, as they said they would when they were in Washington, then we can cooperate. If they won’t, then there’s nothing to cooperate about.

M
OLEY SAILED
for Europe on June 21 and arrived in London a week later. His appearance was much anticipated, despite Roosevelt’s efforts to play it down. For the record, Moley was a “liaison officer” between the president and the American delegation, but the record, in this case, wasn’t persuasive. “Few are so credulous as to be deceived by the official explanations of Professor Moley’s trip,” the
New York Times
editorialized. Moley was going to London to crack the American delegation into line and deliver the president’s decision. And none too soon. “It is time to drop polite pretenses and have the truth bluntly stated,” the
Times
said.

The assumption that Moley was bearing Roosevelt’s version of truth, and that this version would allow the world to begin its ascent from the depths of the depression, caused the conference members to hold their breath at Moley’s approach. “Moley’s reception in London was surpassed only by those given to kings,” Hull remembered, his jealousy still showing after fifteen years. Delegations of high officials, newspapermen, and others, their emotions aroused, hurried down to Plymouth to meet Moley and vie with one another in paying him tribute.” In London Moley called on Hull, as was the secretary of state’s due. But the press ignored Hull in favor of the president’s personal envoy. “He appeared as the only person among the Americans whom they had the slightest interest in seeing,” Hull said. “During the few days that followed, prime ministers and other top officials of governments flocked after Moley as if he were the Pied Piper. I continued to keep in the background as if I were the most insignificant individual hanging about the conference.”

Moley appreciated the attention even while he understood that it wasn’t for him, but rather for what he was thought to represent. What he did
not
understand was that Roosevelt, despite what he had said before Moley’s departure, hadn’t made up his mind about the conference. The favorable news for the American economy continued. The dollar fell further against the pound; a week after Roosevelt told Moley he’d accept stabilization at $4.15, the price topped $4.40. Roosevelt would have been punishing American producers—the very farmers, manufacturers, and workers he was trying to help with the agriculture administration and the NRA—to accept the deal he suggested to Moley. The more he thought about it, and the more he watched the money markets, the less appealing an explicit stabilization formula appeared. To accept a stabilization scheme—a system of fixed exchange rates—would handcuff the American economy to those of Britain and France. Under current circumstances, this seemed a doubtful bargain.

Moreover, it would handcuff
him.
The whole thrust of the Hundred Days was to free the president to manage the American economy as he saw fit. Vigorous leadership
—his
vigorous leadership—was necessary to deal with the emergency, Roosevelt believed. Congress had granted him scope to exercise that leadership at home. To accept a stabilization scheme abroad would undermine much of what he had done during the last three months. He had talked the British and French along, acting the good economic ally but postponing a decision on exchange rates till he had finished with Congress and got the New Deal well started. Now that Congress had adjourned and the New Deal was in motion, he thought seriously about stabilization for the first time. He decided he didn’t like it.

On July 3 he announced his decision. To prevent any further confusion, he spoke in his own voice and in the most straightforward, even shocking, language. The idea that exchange rates could restore prosperity—the consensus of the London conference—was a “specious fallacy,” he said. Nations must look inward rather than outward. “The sound internal economic system of a nation is a greater factor in its well-being than the price of its currency.” For the conference to hold recovery hostage to a delusion of fixed exchange rates would be “a catastrophe amounting to a world tragedy.”

R
OOSEVELT’S MESSAGE
blew up the London conference. “A Manifesto of Anarchy,” the
Manchester Guardian
headlined it. The
London Daily Express
declared, “America is the bonfire boy of the world. She lights a fire which might have been a beacon, then runs away to watch it burn itself out.” The official complaints were more circumspect but hardly less forceful. Ramsay MacDonald, speaking for Britain, Georges Bonnet for France, and Guido Jung for Italy told Hull they had been double-crossed. “All stated very clearly that your yesterday’s message was entirely inconsistent with what you had said in Washington,” the secretary of state cabled Roosevelt.

When Moley met with MacDonald, the prime minister was a wreck. “I have rarely seen a man more distraught than he was that morning,” Moley wrote. “He turned a grief-stricken face to me as I came in, and he cried out, ‘This doesn’t sound like the man I spent so many hours with in Washington. This sounds like a different man. I don’t understand.’” MacDonald declared that the conference was finished, murdered by Roosevelt. “And then, with a curious kind of petulance, he began to speak of what the conference meant to him. For years he had dreamed of such a conference. Its successful outcome, he’d hoped, would be the crowning achievement of his long career. ‘The shadows,’ he said, were already ‘descending’ around him.”

MacDonald never recovered from the failure of the London conference, which sputtered along for a few more weeks before the delegates acknowledged its hopelessness and gave up. Roosevelt denied responsibility. A reporter asked, just after Roosevelt dropped his bombshell, if the administration would change its policy if the conference appeared to be “going on the rocks.” “Don’t put it that way,” Roosevelt responded. “We don’t think it is going on the rocks.”

Yet he refused to change course as the craft hit bottom. When the conference ultimately adjourned in early August, Roosevelt blithely attributed the delegates’ departure to that British passion for grouse. A reporter, evidently thinking of a vacation, laughingly said America ought to import some grouse. “We have enough grousing in this country,” Roosevelt rejoined with an even heartier laugh. He added—“literally and strictly and entirely in the family and off the record”—that one of the contributors to the failure of the conference—“don’t put this down”—was “the Continental and London press. It was rotten, absolutely rotten, and they gave us a dirty deal from the time we left here until we got home…. The whole press just ganged us from the start to the finish. And their press were told what to say by their governments. And of course the French press is owned by anybody that will buy it. And there you are. It was a rotten situation.”

Ray Moley was another casualty of Roosevelt’s bomb throwing. The president’s reversal embarrassed Moley badly. Cordell Hull shed no tears for his assistant. “That piss-ant Moley,” Hull called him. “Here he curled up at my feet and let me stroke his head like a hunting dog, and then he goes and bites me in the ass!” Hull complained to Roosevelt about Moley’s habit of communicating to the president behind his back. Hull got hold of one secret message, a cable in which Moley asserted to Roosevelt that Key Pittman was the “only member of delegation able intellectually and aggressively to present your ideas to the conference.” Hull had known that Moley looked down on him, but this was too much, as he made clear to Roosevelt.

The president had hired Hull not for his intellect but for his loyalty and his ability to get along with Congress. Forced to choose between Moley and Hull, the president took the part of the secretary. He transferred Moley, who, recognizing the move for what it portended, resigned from the administration. “There has been a unanimous sigh of relief from everybody in the Department,” Sumner Welles, the undersecretary of state, wrote. A journalist who had followed the Hull-Moley story from the start observed, “Hull’s gaunt figure and downcast eyes are enough to move one to tears, until one remembers the stiletto protruding from Moley’s back.”

28.

W
HEN
T
IME
NAMED
H
UGH
J
OHNSON ITS
“M
AN OF THE
Y
EAR” IN
D
ECEMBER
1933, Franklin Roosevelt could have been forgiven for feeling slighted. Roosevelt was the architect of the National Recovery Administration, Johnson merely its executor. But the president had to admit that Johnson’s biography made better copy than his own, and he was happy for the lightning the NRA attracted to strike elsewhere than the White House.

Johnson grew up among the Plains Indians and homesteaders of Kansas and Oklahoma. He attended West Point with Douglas MacArthur and chased Pancho Villa across northern Mexico with John Pershing and George Patton. A certain flair for administration called him to the attention of his superiors, and upon American entry into the World War he was handed the job of directing the military draft. America’s most recent draft—during the Civil War—had provoked murderous riots; Johnson’s draft went blessedly smoothly. His secret was the marshaling of public opinion behind the draft. “If public opinion in such a country as this could not be persuaded to support a war, this country could not support that war,” he explained.

Franklin Roosevelt watched Johnson from down the hall at the State-War-Navy building and made a mental note. Johnson moved on to the War Industries Board, where—by now a brigadier general—he teamed up with Bernard Baruch to commandeer American industry. “I went away with one outstanding lesson burned into my brain,” Johnson said afterward: “Government emergency operations are entirely different from routine governmental operations.” And coordination of economic activity was crucial. “Lack of it is so dangerous that it may completely frustrate the almost unlimited power of this country.”

Johnson retired to private industry and better pay after the war, only to reconnect with Baruch in time to campaign for Roosevelt in 1932. The three men reminisced about their common experience in the World War, and they discussed how to apply it to the depression. “If industry can thus act as a unit for the purposes of war,” Johnson said, “why cannot it also act as a unit for the purposes of peace?”

Even before the National Industrial Recovery Act created the National Recovery Administration, Roosevelt floated Johnson’s name as the man who would head the NRA, to test the reaction of the press and the public. Whoever headed the NRA would be extraordinarily powerful, the czar of the American economy. In 1932 Johnson had written and printed for friends a blueprint for an American dictatorship. How serious it was supposed to be became a point of contention. Johnson’s script was framed as a proclamation by “Muscleinny, dictator pro tem,” which suggested a certain tongue-in-cheekiness. But the thrust of the argument was sober enough. Johnson called the depression a “ridiculous if ghastly paradox” and declared that the solution was “singleness of control and immediate action.” He proceeded to lay out a program of emergency powers granted by Congress to the president that looked eerily like the agenda of the Hundred Days. With critics already calling Roosevelt a dictator, the last thing he needed was to nominate someone seen as an acolyte of the Duce.