Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (91 page)

Americans watched in alarm, but alarm alleviated by satisfaction that the oceans to America’s east and west remained almost as wide as ever. The overwhelming response among the American people was that the United States ought to stay out of other people’s troubles. Convinced pacifists held this view on principle; the much larger group that didn’t reject military action altogether contended that nothing on the horizon threatened the United States directly or would threaten it unless American leaders foolishly let the nation be drawn in. In April 1935 college students across the country staged a “peace strike,” dropping their books and abandoning their classrooms to insist that America eschew war. “Abolish the ROTC!” demanded the signs of strikers at the City College of New York. “Build Schools, Not Battleships!” Albert Einstein endorsed the movement toward world peace, writing in the
Daily Princetonian
that “the creation of the deeply felt good-will is the first important step to attain that goal.” Reinhold Niebuhr of the Union Theological Seminary proposed a clerical boycott of war, urging his fellow ministers to refuse to serve as chaplains in the event of war’s outbreak.

Congress echoed the calls for peace. Advocates of legislation to ensure America’s noninvolvement in future wars clamored to put their names on neutrality measures. Most looked backward to view the road ahead. Recalling—with the help of the Nye committee hearings—how Wilson’s neutrality of August 1914 had become America’s belligerence of April 1917, the neutralists demanded not simply that the United States remain impartial between the two sides in a war but that Americans abandon their long-standing insistence on trading with the two sides. The weapons trade was forbidden in all the neutrality proposals; particular versions would have jettisoned American loans, American travel on belligerent vessels, or American exports not carried in foreign ships.

Roosevelt didn’t want to have to deal with neutrality legislation. This was the season of Social Security and the WPA, not to mention the Supreme Court’s initial assault on the New Deal. But the world pressed in. “These are without doubt the most hair-trigger times the world has gone through in your lifetime or mine,” Roosevelt wrote Breckinridge Long, the American ambassador to Italy, in early March. “I do not even exclude June and July 1914, because at that time there was economic and social stability, with only the loom of a war by governments in accordance with preconceived ideas and prognostications. Today there is not one element alone but three.”

In public Roosevelt downplayed the threat to peace. His domestic agenda came first, and in any event he knew he’d have trouble restraining the neutralists once he acknowledged the danger abroad.

His diffidence momentarily spared him controversy, but it led to an appearance of drift. “No one today knows what is the foreign policy of our Government,” Key Pittman, Democratic chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, wrote Roosevelt. “Are we going to participate in European affairs, or are we going to keep out of them? Are we going to enforce treaties, or are we going to abandon them? Are we going to be innocent lambs and simply generous in our international trade, or are we going to be horse traders?”

Roosevelt didn’t enlighten Pittman or anyone else. As the neutralists in Congress pressed toward passage of a neutrality law, Roosevelt refused to say whether he would support or oppose such a measure. Even off the record he tried to have it both ways. “We do want and ought to have some additional neutrality legislation,” he told reporters, “but we are faced with a legislative situation at the end of the session. Therefore I said to Bill Phillips”—the undersecretary of state—“this morning, I said: ‘I am perfectly willing, if we can get an agreement on neutrality legislation, so long as it does not block the adjournment of Congress.’” Given Roosevelt’s ambitions for domestic legislation, this tepid endorsement was tantamount to saying he hoped the neutrality bill would disappear.

It didn’t. Roosevelt got the domestic laws he wanted and a neutrality law he didn’t want. The measure he received from Congress mandated that in the event of war Americans would be prohibited from shipping “arms, ammunition, or implements of war” to the belligerents. Roosevelt’s halfhearted opposition had succeeded in getting a certain executive discretion written into the neutrality bill: the president would determine what constituted “implements of war” and whether a state of war in fact existed. Even after winning this concession, Roosevelt toyed with the idea of a veto, but in the end he chose not to fight the clear trend of public and congressional opinion. He put the best face on things in signing the neutrality law. “I have approved this Joint Resolution because it was intended as an expression of the fixed desire of the Government and the people of the United States to avoid any action which might involve us in war,” he said. “The purpose is wholly excellent, and this Joint Resolution will to a considerable degree serve that end.” In the next breath, though, he warned that conditions might change and require a new approach. “History is filled with unforeseeable situations that call for some flexibility of action.”

H
AROLD
I
CKES’S COMBATIVENESS
often caused Roosevelt problems. The interior secretary’s running feud with Harry Hopkins roiled Washington, complicated public works policy, and afforded reporters embarrassing glimpses of the administration’s dirty linen. But Ickes’s feistiness sometimes served a purpose. In December 1935 Ickes accepted an invitation to address the Town Hall forum of Detroit. The event began inauspiciously. Ickes had taken the overnight train from Washington but hadn’t slept well; he arrived bleary and worn. The auditorium was actually a movie theater in the Fisher Building, an ornately expensive structure underwritten by pre-depression profits from the company the seven Fisher brothers had founded to make auto bodies for Detroit’s car manufacturers. The lights in the theater didn’t work or simply weren’t turned on. “It was a curious experience talking into a dark cave,” Ickes recorded in his diary. Nor was the audience friendly. “It was a well-fed, well-dressed, prosperous crowd, mainly Republican, I should judge.”

The audience got no friendlier as Ickes blasted the opponents of the administration as narrow-minded men who “either possess great wealth themselves or are little brothers of the rich who abase themselves before wealth in the hands of others.” American democracy found itself challenged by a “cruelly ruthless exploiting class looking to a return to power that will make it possible for them to grow even richer while the masses become poorer and poorer.” These exploiters branded the New Deal a step toward communism. They were lying and knew it, Ickes said. “Communism is merely a convenient bugaboo. It is the Fascist-minded men of America who are the real enemies of our institutions through their solidarity and their ability and willingness to turn the wealth of America against the welfare of America.”

Roosevelt was in Warm Springs when Ickes spoke; he returned to Washington a week later. “Whether or not he read anything about my Detroit speech, he did not indicate,” Ickes recorded after meeting with the president. In fact Roosevelt did know about the speech, but he preferred to act as though he didn’t, partly because praise went to Ickes’s head and partly because Roosevelt didn’t want to be held responsible for Ickes’s particular choice of words.

Yet he endorsed Ickes’s combative approach, for he had determined to wage a fighting campaign for reelection. Events hardly dictated this choice. The depression hadn’t ended, but production, employment, and the stock market were all substantially higher than when he had taken office. More significant from a political standpoint, the national mood was decidedly more hopeful. The reforms of 1935 had pushed the demagogues to the margins, where they still shouted, indeed louder than ever, but precisely because the popular ear had turned away. Roosevelt might have coasted to reelection on a feel-good platform of positive achievement and encouraging prospects.

But he didn’t. Instead of political peace he brought the sword. The opponents of the New Deal were not simply mistaken, he asserted; they were malign. Their motives reflected not a different view of democracy but a rejection of democracy itself. “In March 1933, I appealed to the Congress of the United States and to the people of the United States in a new effort to restore power to those to whom it rightfully belonged,” he declared in January 1936, in what was billed as his annual message but which simultaneously served to kick off his reelection campaign. Congress and the people had responded by establishing a fresh relationship between the American government and the American people. “Our aim was to build upon essentially democratic institutions, seeking all the while the adjustment of burdens, the help of the needy, the protection of the weak.” Sad to say—although Roosevelt didn’t sound sad saying it—not everyone had embraced the new dispensation. The agents of organized greed had opposed it. They had briefly admitted their failure in the wake of the 1932 election and fled the scene of their crimes. But they were back. “They seek the restoration of their selfish power.”

Roosevelt did not identify these evil men by name—lest, perhaps, they defend themselves against his allegations. But he painted their actions in lurid detail. “They steal the livery of great national constitutional ideals to serve discredited special interests…. They engage in vast propaganda to spread fear and discord among the people…. They would gang up against the people’s liberties.” They despised democracy, wishing to impose rule by the rich and few. “Autocrats in smaller things, they seek autocracy in bigger things.” Roosevelt challenged these enemies of the people to state openly what they believed. They cast aspersions on the New Deal, suggesting that it had retarded recovery. If this was their conviction, if they wanted to repeal the signature measures sponsored by the administration and approved by Congress, let them assert as much, that there be an open debate. Roosevelt welcomed the challenge.

Shall we say to the farmer, “The prices for your products are in part restored. Now go and hoe your own row”?…Shall we say to the needy unemployed, “Your problem is a local one”?…Shall we say to the children who have worked all day in the factories, “Child labor is a local issue and so are your starvation wages”?…Shall we say to the unemployed and the aged, “Social security lies not within the province of the federal government; you must seek relief elsewhere”?

Merely asking these questions, Roosevelt suggested, would give the lie to the claims of the enemies of democracy. “Our resplendent economic autocracy does not want to return to that individualism of which they prate, even though the advantages under that system went to the ruthless and the strong.” Rather they wished to capture the instruments of power the New Deal had created. “In the hands of a people’s government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people. Give them their way and they will take the course of every autocracy of the past—power for themselves, enslavement for the public.”

It was an astonishing performance. Presidents typically employed a higher tone in delivering their annual messages; Roosevelt’s was a campaign broadside, and an incendiary one at that. He had guaranteed the largest possible audience by delivering it in the evening, so that Americans could hear it live on the radio (and in so doing completed the conversion of the written annual message into the prime-time spectacle of the State of the Union address). By branding his opponents as enemies of the people, Roosevelt came disturbingly close to the demagoguery not only of Father Coughlin and the late Huey Long but also of the fascists of Europe. To be sure, he intended nothing like the Nazi purges, but by declaring class war in America, he polarized politics as American politics hadn’t been polarized since the Populist era.

The surprising aspect of Roosevelt’s performance was that it was fundamentally nonpartisan. In fact, the striking thing about the campaign of 1936 was how little it had to do with parties. Roosevelt remained a progressive, although by now liberal was the more common identifier for his philosophy. And he understood that progressivism, or liberalism, transcended party lines. There weren’t enough Democrats in the country to have cast all those pro–New Deal votes in the 1934 elections; Republicans had defected in large numbers. Nor by any means were all Democrats liberals. Conservatives controlled the party in the South; to these were added some wealthy Democrats from other regions who were more conservative than many Republicans.

Roosevelt occasionally dreamed of building a new party, one not bound by the prejudices and alliances of the Democratic past. But in his waking hours he settled for reconstructing the coalition on which Democratic power had been based. He was a Democratic president, and he led the Democrats into the campaign. But even to Democratic audiences he emphasized that the true struggle was larger than any party. Five days after his State of the Union speech, he addressed the Democrats by radio on the occasion of their annual Jackson Day dinners. “I speak tonight to this Democratic meeting, to these Democratic meetings throughout the nation, in the same language as if I were addressing a Republican gathering, a Progressive gathering, an Independent gathering, a Farmer-Labor gathering, a gathering of business men or a gathering of workers or farmers,” he said. “There is nothing that I say here tonight that does not apply to every citizen in the country no matter what his or her political affiliations may be.”