Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (92 page)

Again he raised the battle flag. “We are at peace with the world, but the fight goes on,” he said. “Our frontiers of today are economic, not geographic. Our enemies of today are the forces of privilege and greed within our own borders.” Andrew Jackson provided the model and the inspiration for the contemporary struggle. “Jackson sought social justice; Jackson fought for human rights in his many battles to protect the people against autocratic or oligarchic aggression.” Jackson’s enemies, the autocrats and oligarchs, had resisted him with all the weapons of propaganda and intimidation at their disposal. “But the people of his day were not deceived. They loved him for the enemies he had made.” Roosevelt cast himself as the modern Jackson in summoning all men and women of good faith to join his battle against the narrow, selfish interests: “the small minority of business men and financiers against whom you and I will continue to wage war.”

A
L
S
MITH COULDN’T
stand it any longer. The former governor and presidential candidate had kept his differences with Roosevelt to himself, out of loyalty to the Democratic party if not regard for his former protégé. Not that he wasn’t tempted to go public—by certain other Democrats. During the summer of 1934 John Raskob organized members of Wall Street’s Democratic minority to pronounce against the New Deal. The group called itself the American Liberty League, and it was joined by various Republicans. Raskob asked Smith, for whom he had done numerous financial favors, to join, and Smith did. For several months more Smith’s attachment to the Democratic party continued to outweigh his concerns about the direction in which Roosevelt was taking it, but after Roosevelt launched his scorched-earth campaign against wealth and conservatism, Smith decided to fight back.

The Liberty League gathered at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel in late January 1936, a few weeks after Roosevelt’s Jackson Day speech. “The listeners in the dining room, who numbered 2,000 in the aggregate, represented, either through principals or attorneys, a large portion of the capitalistic wealth of the country,” a reporter at the dinner observed. Smith commenced his remarks by reaffirming his party loyalties. “I was born in the Democratic party and expect to die in it,” he said. “It is not easy for me to stand up here tonight and talk to the American people”—his speech, too, was being broadcast by radio—“against a Democratic administration…. It hurts me.” But it had to be done. The president had crossed the line of political discourse by arraying class against class. “It has been freely predicted that if we were ever to have civil strife again in this country it would come from the appeal to the passions and prejudices that come from the demagogues who would incite one class of our people against the other.” The president was attempting to do precisely that.

Smith blamed Roosevelt for ignoring the Democratic platform on which he had been elected in 1932. Where was the balanced budget? Where the reduction in federal spending the platform promised? The platform had pledged to lighten the burden of government upon private enterprise; what had been the reality? “NRA! A vast octopus set up by government that wound its arms all around the business of the country, paralyzed big business and choked little business to death.”

To this point in his talk, Smith’s critique of Roosevelt was standard conservative fare. But as he warmed to his task, Smith’s indictment grew feverish. The New Deal was socialism in poor disguise, he said. “The young Brain Trusters caught the Socialists in swimming and they ran away with their clothes. Now, it is all right with me if they want to disguise themselves as Karl Marx or Lenin or any of the rest of that bunch, but I won’t stand for their allowing them to march under the banner of Jackson or Cleveland.” The choice was plain, at least to Smith. “There can be only one capital, Washington or Moscow. There can be only one atmosphere of government, the clear, pure, fresh air of free America, or the foul breath of communistic Russia. There can be only one flag, the Stars and Stripes or the flag of the godless Union of the Soviets. There can be only one national anthem, the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ or the ‘Internationale.’”

A
S THE
R
EPUBLICANS
looked toward the 1936 election, they had to decide how much distance to put between themselves and the New Deal. Almost none of the GOP leaders liked Roosevelt’s reforms in principle, but more than a few acknowledged the popularity of certain of them—and if the leaders hadn’t recognized it on their own, the defections in the Republican ranks would have clued them. William Borah—Alice Roosevelt’s paramour, Woodrow Wilson’s foe, and the voice of Republican pragmatism at this point—put the matter concisely. “Unless the Republican party is delivered from its reactionary leadership and reorganized in accord with its one-time liberal principles,” the Idaho senator said, “it will die like the Whig party, of sheer political cowardice.” The people were demanding change, and the Republican party wasn’t giving it to them. “They are offered the Constitution. But the people can’t eat the Constitution.”

Alfred M. Landon agreed. The Kansas governor was the sole survivor among Republican governors of the Democratic tidal wave of 1934. Kansas had always been a curious state politically, from its territorial birth in the blood of the slavery crisis, through the Populist passions of the Gilded Age, and on to the Ku Klux Klan battles of the 1920s. Alf Landon jumped into politics from the oil fields of southeastern Kansas, running for governor in 1932 on a platform of fiscal retrenchment and defeating the Democratic incumbent when a quack doctor, John “Goat Glands” Brinkley, siphoned off some of the rejuvenationist vote.

Though often called the “Kansas Coolidge” for his reluctance to waste either money or words, Landon wasn’t entirely averse to progressive ideas. He had voted the Progressive ticket in 1924, favoring La Follette over the real Coolidge. In his inaugural address as governor he sounded a good deal like Franklin Roosevelt. “Our problems have been intensified by the great industrial plutocracy we have built since the last depression of 1893,” he said. “I do not believe the Jeffersonian theory that the best government is the one that governs the least can be applied today. I think that as civilization becomes more complex, government power must increase.”

Many Republicans had difficulty swallowing Landon’s latitudinarianism; others realized that something like it was the party’s only plausible hope of challenging Roosevelt and the New Deal. The governor skipped the primaries that preceded the 1936 convention. “My fixed purpose,” he explained, “is to keep the party in the best possible shape to win the election.” Landon appreciated that unity was the GOP’s only hope against Roosevelt. William Borah and Herbert Hoover were battling for the party’s soul and perhaps for its presidential nomination. Borah strove to liberalize the party, Hoover to maintain its conservative character. Landon left the fighting to the others, judging that his best chance was to promise to do much of what Roosevelt was doing, only better. “We cannot go back to the days before this depression,” he said. “We must go forward, facing our new problems.”

Landon’s strategy made sense to most Republicans. The strategists among the GOP leadership decided that they needed to bridge the gap between the industrial states of the East and the farm states of the West; midwesterner Landon seemed their likeliest bet. Borah faded, and while Hoover hoped for a draft, especially after the party leaders agreed to let him address the convention at Cleveland, the speech did him more harm than good. The Hoover of 1936 looked too much like the Hoover of 1932, and the delegates decided not to risk a rematch of the earlier race. Landon won on the first ballot, acting as though the nomination had sought him rather than the reverse. To lend verisimilitude to this fiction, he rejected Roosevelt’s example from four years earlier and stayed personally away from the convention. Yet he issued a statement from the executive mansion in Topeka that he intended to wage “one of the most aggressive campaigns the Republican party has seen in many years.”

R
OOSEVELT’S RENOMINATION
by the Democrats was a foregone conclusion, as was his appearance at the Philadelphia convention to accept the nomination. His speech tolled the same warnings he had been making for months, with a twist appropriate to the convention’s setting in the birthplace of American freedom. He denounced the “economic royalists” of the Republican era as the moral descendants of King George III. These “privileged princes” had created a “new despotism” and fastened it upon the American people. The election of 1932 had been the equivalent of the battles of Lexington and Concord, and the New Deal was the analogue to the Declaration of Independence. Roosevelt didn’t claim infallibility for his program; administrations and presidents made mistakes.

But the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference. There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

Roosevelt kept up the drumbeat during the autumn campaign. He reminded voters of what he had confronted on taking office: the hunger, the homelessness, the fear. He lampooned those conservatives who had been happy for the government to save their bank accounts but now criticized it for the very regulations that kept them whole. He ridiculed charges that the administration wasted money on relief. “Of course we spent money,” he said. “It went to put needy men and women without jobs to work.”

He concluded the campaign, as usual, at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Twenty thousand supporters crowded the building. Eleanor, Anna, and Sara joined him on the platform. With sarcasm honed through months of repetition, he heaped derision on those who had driven America to the brink of disaster. “Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines!” he pronounced. “Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair!” The enemies of the people now strove to regain their power by discrediting what the administration, with the support of the people, had accomplished to undo their folly. The administration had frustrated them, and their frustration redoubled their fury. “They are unanimous in their hate for me,” Roosevelt said. “And I welcome their hatred.”

The crowd erupted. They cheered and stamped their feet so long that Roosevelt had to ask them to be quiet. Gradually they calmed down.