Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (83 page)

B
Y THE AUTUMN
of 1934 it seemed that everyone was promoting a plan to end the depression. Upton Sinclair, the muckraking journalist from the days of Theodore Roosevelt, had, like Townsend, moved to California, where the same passion that had inspired
The Jungle,
his exposé of the meatpacking industry—which was supposed to drive America to socialism rather than vegetarianism—gave rise to EPIC, short for “End Poverty in California.” Sinclair’s plan aimed to turn the means of production in the state over to the producers. The state would supply land to the landless and factories to the jobless. It would also print pseudo-money that could be spent only on items grown or manufactured within EPIC’s pseudo-economy. To publicize his plan, Sinclair announced his candidacy for California governor. Or perhaps the point of his plan was to publicize his candidacy; either way, the plan and the candidacy garnered great publicity. In the Democratic primary Sinclair trounced the mainstream candidate and polled more votes than the incumbent governor did in the Republican primary. Veteran observers of California politics, even while scratching their heads trying to understand the EPIC phenomenon, saw little to prevent Sinclair from sweeping into the governor’s house in November. Sinclair requested a conference with Roosevelt, which Roosevelt declined, leaving Sinclair to proclaim his revelation on his own. “Capitalism has served its time and is passing from the face of the earth,” he said. “A new system must be found to take its place.”

I
T WASN’T AN
accident that land-transferring socialism took hold in California. Though nicknamed for its mining past, the Golden State lived or died on agriculture, and in the mid-1930s it was on the verge of dying. The same problems of overproduction that vexed farmers elsewhere existed in California, but they were exacerbated by the historic tendency of Americans in other parts of the country to look west for solutions to their problems. During the depression no part of the country suffered more than the Great Plains, where a host of evils beset farmers who hadn’t been prosperous to begin with. Excessive optimism during the homestead era of the late nineteenth century had led to the settlement of districts that couldn’t really support the communities planted upon them; modern technology permitted the plowing of vast swaths of grassland that never should have been broken and turned; unprecedented demand during the World War had driven prices to unsustainable levels. Prices fell after the war, weakening the economies of the Plains states. They fell further with the onset of the depression.

Then the rains ceased. Farmers hadn’t lived on the Plains long enough to know that drought was part of the recurrent climate pattern in that region (the aboriginal peoples knew, which was why they didn’t try to farm there). Some farmers attributed the drought to bad luck, others to the wrath of God. The wrathful explanation seemed the more persuasive when hot winds blew across the parched, torn earth and lifted tons of topsoil high into the air, building battlements of brown, churning dust five thousand feet tall and fifty miles long that blotted out the sun and choked humans and livestock as the wave of airborne topsoil rolled across villages, towns, and cities.

Lorena Hickok encountered a dust storm on the northern Plains. Harry Hopkins had put her to work reporting on the lives of ordinary Americans, in order to determine where federal relief was needed most. “When I got up at 7:30 this morning, the sky seemed to be clear,” she wrote from South Dakota.

But you couldn’t see the sun! There was a queer brown haze—only right above was the sky clear. And the wind was blowing a gale. It kept on blowing, harder and harder. And the haze kept mounting in the sky. By the time we had finished breakfast and were ready to start out, about 9, the sun was only a lighter spot in the dust that filled the sky like a brown fog. We drove only a few miles and had to turn back. It got worse and worse, rapidly. You couldn’t see a foot ahead by the time we got back, and we had a time getting back! It was like driving through a fog, only worse, for there was that damnable wind. It seemed as though the car would be blown right off the road any minute. When we stopped, we had to put on the emergency brake. It was a truly terrifying experience. We were being whirled off into space in a vast, impenetrable cloud of brown dust.

They had the street lights on when we finally groped our way back into town. They stayed on the rest of the day. By noon the sun wasn’t even a light spot in the sky any more. You couldn’t see it at all. It was so dark, and the dust was so thick that you couldn’t see across the street. I was lying on the bed reading the paper and glanced up—the window looked black, just as it does at night. I was terrified, for a moment. It seemed like the end of the world.

Farming became impossible in the Dust Bowl, as a large swath of the Plains was soon called. Farm families left the region by the tens of thousands, fleeing to California. They didn’t know what they would find there, but they were certain it couldn’t be worse than what they were leaving. Their journey became a social and human epic, a tale of tragedy and courage immortalized in John Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath
and similar works; their experience contributed to the political EPIC of Upton Sinclair after their arrival added to the glut of agricultural workers in California. Some of the migrants turned militant, joining the Communist party or at least following the Communists out on strike in the Salinas and Imperial valleys. But a larger number found Sinclair’s promise of land to the landless more appealing. Democratic socialism they could stomach, revolutionary communism probably not.

H
ARRY
B
RIDGES ARRIVED
in the United States from Australia shortly after the World War. He joined the radical Industrial Workers of the World as the Wobblies’ never-promising fortunes faded amid the postwar crackdown on leftists, but he soon jumped ship for the San Francisco local of the International Longshoremen’s Association. From the standpoint of steady work, this was another bad move, for the ILA had been shunned by the dock owners since a wrenching strike at the war’s end. Bridges was blacklisted, making him more radical than ever. Whether or not he formally joined the Communist party became a matter of later dispute, but he didn’t disguise his belief that the Marxists had it right on the inevitability of class struggle between workers and owners. A dock strike in San Francisco in July 1934 turned lethally violent when the owners imported strikebreakers and the strikers resisted. The police opened fire, killing two strikers. Bridges’s charisma and pugnacity had propelled him to leadership among the dockers, and in the wake of the killings he attempted to extend his reach by calling a general strike of all workers in the city. General strikes in other countries had often foreshadowed revolution, and this one got off to a promising start. For nearly a week the city was paralyzed, its docks closed, its cable cars still, its warehouses silent. The summer fog off the ocean rolled down streets vacant of traffic and almost empty of pedestrians. Eventually the spell broke, and the workers drifted back to their jobs. But rarely had labor shown such strength, and never in American history had the possibility of a working-class revolution loomed so large.

Militant unionists mobilized similarly in Minneapolis. The Teamsters played the role in the Twin Cities that the longshoremen filled at the Golden Gate; the conflict the Teamsters provoked—or suffered, depending on one’s point of view—was even bloodier than that in San Francisco. Police fire killed two and wounded more than sixty. Governor Floyd Olson, no lackey of capital, was so alarmed that he imposed martial law lest the violence escalate or Minneapolis follow San Francisco into a general strike.

The labor violence spread still further east as the summer faded. Textile workers in New England complained that mill owners weren’t honoring their commitments to the cotton code of the NRA; when the owners ignored the complaints the workers struck. Sympathizers in several eastern states joined the stoppage, and vandals and arsonists soon jumped in. Again the police entered the fray; again blood flowed in the gutters. “A few hundred funerals,” a textile trade paper editorialized, “will have a quieting influence.”

R
OOSEVELT WOULD HAVE
been forced to comment on the strikes had he not spent the month of the worst of the fighting incommunicado. At the beginning of July he embarked on the first two-ocean cruise ever undertaken by a president. His ship was the
Houston,
one of the new class of American destroyers. At six hundred feet in length and a mere sixty-five feet abeam, it sliced through the seas as swiftly as any vessel afloat. “Her quoted speed is 30 knots, but her officers smile when they say it,” a reporter covering the voyage explained. Roosevelt chose the
Houston
for its speed but also for the fact that as a fleet flagship the vessel had quarters for an admiral—or a president—in addition to those for its own commander. The crew painted and polished the ship and rearranged a few things for his convenience. A space on deck was cleared so he could view films and newsreels when the evening was calm. Otherwise Roosevelt insisted on experiencing the ship in the same manner as its officers and men. They would be sailing through steamy weather and sultry seas; his cabin was to be ventilated but not cooled. “There is no such luxury as air-conditioning aboard, and no one denies that when the sun beats down on a steel ship it generates heat,” the reporter remarked.

Roosevelt’s voyage had several objectives. Not the least was simple rest and relaxation. Salt air had always invigorated his mind and body, and he expected it would invigorate him now. Presidential holidays on land presented problems of logistics and security; on board the
Houston
these largely disappeared. Roosevelt wanted to visit some of America’s strategic overseas possessions, particularly Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, and Hawaii. He wished to be the first American president to traverse the Panama Canal.