Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (77 page)

Roosevelt also wanted to gauge how Johnson would react to the prospect of wielding power. “I think he’s a good number-three man, maybe a number-two man,” Bernard Baruch told Frances Perkins, the labor secretary, in words intended for Roosevelt. “But he’s not a number-one man. He’s dangerous and unstable. He gets nervous and sometimes goes away for days without notice. I’m fond of him, but do tell the President to be careful.”

Roosevelt took Baruch’s warning to heart. Rather than give Johnson control of both agencies created by the National Industrial Recovery Act—the NRA and the Public Works Administration—Roosevelt decided to split responsibility and give the PWA to Harold Ickes at the Interior Department. He casually informed Johnson of the decision at a cabinet meeting. Johnson didn’t handle surprises well, and on this occasion he turned various shades of purple. “I don’t see why,” he spluttered. “I don’t see why.” Roosevelt pretended not to notice and moved on to other business. But as the meeting adjourned, he summoned Frances Perkins. “Stick with Hugh,” he said. “Keep him sweet. Don’t let him explode.” Perkins caught up with Johnson as they left the room. “He’s ruined me,” Johnson muttered.

Yet Roosevelt had measured Johnson accurately. After Perkins drove the general around Washington for a few hours, to calm him down and shield him from reporters, he accepted Roosevelt’s truncated offer. Even so, his inner turmoil surfaced in the comment he made to the press when his appointment became official. “It will be red fire at first and dead cats afterward,” Johnson said. “This is just like mounting the guillotine on the infinitesimal gamble that the ax won’t work.”

Johnson’s tenure went surprisingly well at the start. Or perhaps it wasn’t surprising, in that the contributors to the codes that were the first order of NRA business were desperate for anything that would ease their pain. Johnson’s world was divided into three parts. The NRA recognized industry, labor, and consumers as the keys to recovery; in each sector of the economy, the three groups were convened to contribute to the codes that would govern their behavior and interaction. Johnson started with cotton textiles, in part because of its particularly dire condition, in part because Roosevelt had made it a symbol of cutthroat competition during the campaign, and in part because a group of mill owners had come to Roosevelt asking him to rescue them from themselves. Johnson’s business background gave him a credibility with manufacturers most other New Dealers lacked; mill owners who worried about Roosevelt’s “professors” found Johnson’s straight talk reassuring.

The basic plan for the code making was simple enough. Industry was invited to initiate things by submitting a proposal for a code—that is, for a schedule of production, wages, and prices. This proposal was submitted to representatives of workers and consumers, who would challenge the parts they found unfair or unworkable. With the help of NRA officials expert in that sector—and with timely intervention by Johnson and occasional jawboning by Roosevelt himself—the three groups would hammer out a compromise. The president would sign the code with a flourish, congratulate the parties on work well done, and urge them to carry their spirit of cooperation forward into the implementation of the code.

Textiles fit the pattern perfectly, and within three weeks of the creation of the NRA Roosevelt signed the textile code into law. The president applauded the signatories for their cooperation and good will, and he expressed particular pride that the code abolished child labor in the textile industry. “After years of fruitless effort and discussion, this ancient atrocity went out in a day, because this law permits employers to do by agreement that which none of them could do separately and live in competition.” The textile industry had often been criticized—by Roosevelt, among others—as being the most backward of businesses. Suddenly, with the guidance of government, it vaulted to the forefront of industrial enlightenment, becoming “a leader of a new thing in economics and government.”

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“new thing” was sparked vigorous debate. In certain respects the New Deal was structurally conservative, shoring up the capitalist system as the capitalists themselves might have done had they been able. Roosevelt’s rescue of the banks fell into this conservative category; his timely assistance allowed the banks to resume business essentially as they had conducted it before the crisis began.

In other respects, though, the New Deal was structurally radical, and in none more radical than in industrial policy. The NRA entailed a breathtaking extension of federal involvement in the American economy. Never in peacetime—and only once, and temporarily, in war—had Washington taken upon itself the responsibility of organizing industry, of making decisions on hiring, production, distribution, and pricing that heretofore had been left to companies and individuals. Not surprisingly, Roosevelt soft-pedaled the revolutionary nature of what he was attempting. In late July 1933, two weeks after signing the textile code, Roosevelt went on the radio to explain the NRA’s mission and methods. He stressed the spirit of cooperation that had brought capital and labor together, and he called for more of the same. “I am now asking the cooperation that comes from opinion and from conscience,” the president said. Opinion and conscience were the only instruments the government would use in its efforts to revive the economy. “But we shall use them to the limit,” he added significantly, “to protect the willing from the laggard and to make the plan succeed.”

As Roosevelt’s words intimated, the revolution he had in mind was partly structural but equally psychological. The NRA codes would create new institutional relationships among owners, workers, and consumers, but these relationships would be fruitful and durable only if they were accompanied by a change in mindset among the parties to the codes. For decades American capitalism had been premised on competition—on the self-interest Adam Smith had identified as the motive force of the marketplace. Roosevelt was asking the erstwhile competitors to cease their struggle and cooperate. Their aim should not be individual self-interest but the common interest of themselves collectively and of the American people at large.

His model, as he had stated repeatedly, was taken from the nation’s experience during the World War. He cited that model in his radio address, when he introduced an emblem—a blue eagle—that would signify participation in the NRA programs. “In war, in the gloom of night attack, soldiers wear a bright badge on their shoulders to be sure that comrades do not fire on comrades,” he said. The same principle applied now. “We have provided a badge of honor for this purpose, a simple design with a legend, ‘We do our part.’” Roosevelt asserted that Americans could seize their destiny, as they had done during the war. “I have no sympathy with the professional economists who insist that things must run their course and that human agencies can have no influence on economic ills…. But I do have faith, and retain faith, in the strength of the common purpose, and in the strength of unified action taken by the American people.”

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confirm Roosevelt’s faith during the rest of the summer. The administration targeted ten industries as essential to economic recovery. Besides textiles, these were coal, oil, steel, autos, lumber, garments, construction, wholesale trade, and retail trade. The last four entailed so many firms of such diverse natures that their codes were put on hold for the time being, in order to focus on the first six. The administration’s success in textiles led Johnson and the codifiers to turn hopefully to coal and the others.

The coal question had vexed the American political economy for decades. In the 1870s industrial terrorists called Molly Maguires had murdered foremen and other representatives of ownership. The owners retaliated by hiring private spies to infiltrate the workers’ communities and turn miner against miner. The pendulum swung in the workers’ favor during the Progressive era, when Theodore Roosevelt took the miners’ side against a particularly arrogant group of owners. The subsequent generation had accomplished little to alleviate the harsh feelings between the two sides, and the onset of the depression simply made matters worse. “There were, on both sides, the scars of bloodshed in old battles,” Johnson remarked, after trying to negotiate a truce. “They recognized the hopelessness of their condition, but there was too much bitter history in the background for them even to confer. They frankly said there was no hope of composition on any national plan.” Nor was the divide between the miners and the owners the only one that mattered. The coal industry included hundreds of small operators who didn’t trust one another and definitely didn’t trust the large concerns. Before Johnson could even approach the unions, he had to persuade the owners to agree on a code proposal.

The annual convention of the coal owners was winding down at Chicago on the day Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act. Johnson seized an army plane for a flight from Washington, having called ahead and urged the owners not to disperse before he could make his pitch. “The plane got away on reports of good weather over the Alleghenies,” Johnson remembered, “and with the aid of a miniature staff we began at once on the plane to try to prepare a presentation to the convention. It was a task so engrossing that nobody even looked out the window for an hour.” When they did, they suddenly lost interest in their paperwork. “My hair rose on end,” Johnson said. “Wet wisps of mist were floating and waving by like washing on a clothes line on a windy day. Just as I raised my eyes, one of these ethereal union-suits flapped its legs up and disclosed that we were headed into a mountain not a hundred yards away, with no sight of its top and no idea of what lay on left, right, or bottom.” The plane had lost radio contact with the ground and had wandered off course. The pilot couldn’t tell where they were or which way to go. Fuel was running low by the time they identified Johnstown (in part by the persisting evidence of the great flood of 1889), forty miles off course. They reached Pittsburgh on empty tanks, grateful to be back on terra firma but more anxious than ever—now that the imminent peril to life and limb had passed—to keep the coal men from leaving Chicago. Johnson drove to a Pittsburgh radio station, which fashioned a link to the convention hall in Chicago. But the effort failed. His impromptu message was garbled and incoherent, and the meeting broke up with the owners no closer to cooperation.

Yet Johnson persisted. He managed to get enough of the owners to sit down with the union leaders to create a passable quorum, and he let them air their ancient grievances. He mostly avoided taking sides, but when one party or the other seemed stuck on an emotional point he employed certain phrases he had learned from army mule skinners in the Mexican campaign. “You do not get a dozen warring districts which have never known peace in our lifetime, and the labor in all these districts, together with each other and with their employees to agree for the first time in history by suavity and slickness or by reading economic lectures by a professor,” he explained after the fact.

Johnson kept Roosevelt apprised of the progress of the talks, but the president avoided direct involvement. Feelings were certain to be bruised before the code took final shape, and Roosevelt wanted to be sure that the injured blamed Johnson and not him. Reporters asked how a particular phase of the talks had gone; Roosevelt replied: “It must have been amusing—this is strictly off the record. Apparently Johnson got Pinchot”—Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation mentor and currently governor of Pennsylvania—“in one hotel, and Lewis”—John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers—“in another, and locked them in. And he got the vice president of the Steel Corporation”—U.S. Steel, which controlled huge coal fields in addition to being the biggest steel company in the world—“in a third hotel, and locked him in and kept them all there. And, at the psychological moment, he would bring two out and get them together, and then the other two, and get them together, and work them around. Hugh Johnson has done a swell job on this.”