The People, No

by Frank, Thomas

  * * *

  DEPRESSION-ERA ANTI-P OPULISM TOOK a while to find its voice. In 1932 the ideological opposition to Roosevelt was weak. The Hoover administration had failed by any standard of judgment and no one really knew how much would change when the gloomy Republican was replaced by the sunny aristocrat from upstate New York. What FDR meant by “a New Deal” was still vague and his party’s platform in ’32 was perfectly conventional, recommending balanced budgets and an end to Prohibition. Perhaps it would merely be another instance of the outs replacing the ins, lots of noise signifying nothing.

  Very quickly, however, it became clear that Roosevelt was working an enormous change in the economic role of the federal government—or, as he himself put it in his State of the Union address in 1936, “a new relationship between Government and people.”

  Under his direction, the United States finally left the gold standard. It handed out relief to the unemployed. It hired armies of people to build bridges and buildings, to paint murals and shovel snow. It set up a national old-age pension scheme. It bailed out homeowners. It bailed out farmers. It regulated banks and countless other industries. It protected unions and encouraged workers to join them. There were strikes in every city, new walkouts were happening all the time, and in an alarming number of them business owners were being forced to settle.

  Each of these developments, by itself, would have been a momentous change; now they were happening together, all at once. The big-business community reeled in shock. Its leaders looked for a way to fight back.

  The showdown came in the election of 1936. As the political parties maneuvered and the nation’s elites chose sides, it became plain that this campaign would be a battle royal, an all-or-nothing war over the future direction of the nation. A crusade, from one perspective, for freedom and the Constitution. Or, viewed slightly differently, an attempt by the once-privileged to regain their former position. Either way, it was to be a referendum on big government and the welfare state.

  There were three main components of the anti-Roosevelt forces. The Republican Party furnished the presidential candidate: Kansas governor Alf Landon, who had been something of a progressive in earlier days but was now willing to commit himself to the defeat of the New Deal. He would attack all of it, from Social Security to the WPA, as an imposition on freedom itself.

  Even more important than the Republican Party in 1936 was the independent political effort mounted by big business. The organizations through which business leaders distributed their propaganda were many, but the one that mattered most was called the American Liberty League. The first of the nation’s great right-wing front groups, the Liberty League was set up by a handful of wealthy people, chiefly from the DuPont family, who had special reason to hate and fear the triumph of progressives. * With the lavish budget its wealthy backers furnished, the League followed the strategy pioneered by Mark Hanna forty years previously, producing speeches, radio broadcasts, pamphlets, and a blizzard of panic-screaming headlines. The Liberty League was better funded and far better organized than a traditional political party, which made it the de facto “leading opposition to Roosevelt,” as one scholarly study recalls. 2

  The third part of the ’36 crusade was the newspaper industry, which came together against the would-be dictator Roosevelt the same way it had united against Bryan in 1896. The reason for journalism’s overwhelming hostility to the president seems obvious in retrospect: the owners of the nation’s papers were wealthy figures who regarded themselves as spokesmen for their local business communities; they also felt their immediate interests to be threatened by the unionization that the New Deal encouraged. Whatever the reason, their cohesion was remarkable. FDR himself believed that the press was 85 percent against him; the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it at 75 percent of the country’s big-city newspapers; Frank Luther Mott, in American Journalism , suggests that 63 percent of all the nation’s papers were opposed to the president. 3

  The year 1936 was to be a great mustering of society’s elites, assembling for war against populism once again. The Roosevelt administration, they would charge, was a dangerous departure from established and bipartisan economic consensus. It was the work of cranks, radicals, and demagogues. It was the product of one man’s mental illness. It was the tragic outcome of a system that permitted ordinary people to hand down judgments on matters that were far above their station. And so another Democracy Scare gripped the country.

  * * *

  ONE NODE WHERE the fear began was the National Association of Manufacturers, the great ideological union of American industry, which had been waging a propaganda war against organized labor for decades before the New Deal arrived on the scene. The Depression and its political consequences, however, would prove to be the greatest challenge in the NAM’s life, requiring its most advanced efforts.

  The central idea in the NAM’s vast output in the thirties, according to historian Richard Tedlow, was the “harmony of all classes.” There need be no conflict between business owner and business employee, the NAM maintained; nor was there any need for friction between business and government. Consensus was the natural and normal condition of economic life: “Prosperity dwells where harmony reigns,” as the NAM slogan had it. 4

  The reality of the Depression was anything but harmonious. In 1934, the NAM made a series of proposals to President Roosevelt to get the economy going again, asking him to reverse himself on nearly every front—put the country back on the gold standard, balance the federal budget, crack down on labor, and generally to do whatever would make business owners happy. 5

  Roosevelt did not comply. His aides scoffed at the NAM’s suggestions, and the New Deal chugged onward. Workers organized, regulators regulated, and the WPA continued to hire unemployed people.

  An ugly mood began to sweep the business community. In a controversial 1935 article, the financier E. F. Hutton said he felt the pain of the stockholder who got to “watch the value of his securities gradually destroyed by unwarranted attacks of demagogues in high places,” meaning by New Deal regulation. Then Hutton urged his corporate colleagues to join forces and enlist in the class war. “I say:—‘Let’s gang up!’ ”

  Gang up on the elected government in Washington, that is. Business leaders, Hutton said, needed to build an “unbroken front” of upper-class solidarity. “The business men of the country,” he urged,

  the owners of stocks and bonds or any other property, the holders of insurance policies, and the depositors in banks, must realize that the only way to prevent regimentation, collectivism, or any other ism … is for all groups to join together in one great group which will come to the help of any individual group when it is attacked. 6

  When E. F. Hutton talked, people listened.* Many of them were outraged by what they heard him saying, but a few saw the wisdom of his remarks.

  Gang up is precisely what business leaders did. A few months later, at their next annual meeting, the members of the NAM enlisted for the duration. “Industry … has been forced to enter the political arena,” proclaimed the association’s president, “or be destroyed as a private enterprise.” The scene at the gathering was electric. The assembled businessmen approved a passionate manifesto denouncing the New Deal’s “dictatorship” and espousing the “American System” of private enterprise. One eminent man after another declared his selfless concern for his country and the working masses. 7

  A Detroit steelmaker counseled the NAM’s members to talk politics with their employees and take control of the Republican Party. A business school professor advised them to “submit to regulation but to resist control,” in the description of the New York Times. A ferocious anti-populist note was struck by shipbuilder Clinton Bardo, who berated the “economic crack-pots, social reformers, labor demagogues and political racketeers” who, he claimed, had made the Depression so much worse. The New Deal, he continued, was “the most savage and concerted political attempt ever made toward the destruction of our industrial system.” 8
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  THE SAME SORT of gripe could be heard in every corner of upper America. One fine day in 1934, a vice president at DuPont wrote a letter to a former chairman of General Motors to complain about the New Deal. Here is how it had ruined his life:

  Five Negroes on my place in South Carolina refused work this Spring, after I had taken care of them and given them house [sic ] rent free and work for three years during bad times, saying they had easy jobs with the government.…

  A cook on my houseboat at Fort Myers quit because the government was paying him a dollar an hour as a painter when he never knew a thing about painting before.

  The former GM bigwig felt his colleague’s pain. Something was indeed going very wrong in this country. In his reply, he suggested that the DuPont exec set up “some very definite organization” to instruct Americans on “the value of encouraging people to work; encouraging people to get rich; [and] showing the fallacy of communism.” 9

  So was born the American Liberty League, the central organization of the business resistance to Roosevelt. Spawned by an executive’s frustration at uppity working people, the Liberty League was anti-populist by birth but also by nature. As it began its “educational” work, it quickly became clear that the organization’s grand purpose was to demonstrate elite consensus, to show that the nation’s respectables stood shoulder to shoulder in solid agreement against the Rooseveltian experiment. Bipartisanship was an essential ingredient in this display—the Liberty League enlisted many prominent Democrats in its war on the Democrat in the White House, including two of the party’s former presidential candidates. Credentialed prestige was another component: the League’s spokesmen were drawn conspicuously from the most authoritative circles of economic and legal thought.

  The overarching message of the Liberty League’s resistance to Roosevelt was simple and monotonous. The New Deal, went the complaint, was a form of dictatorship akin to those in Italy, Germany, and Russia. It was trampling upon the American Constitution. It was crushing American liberty. Who knew or cared if FDR was on the Left or the Right: he was clearly a would-be authoritarian and the country needed to be saved from him and his monster government. Cue hysteria. Crank it all the way up.

  A 1935 Liberty League pamphlet, authored by an economics professor from Vanderbilt University, labeled Henry Wallace, then the secretary of agriculture, a “Little Dictator” who might yet become “a real Stalin.” Another pamphlet, published later that year, compared the New Deal both to the “autocratic power” of King George and also to the fascist systems of Mussolini and Hitler. The subtitle of a third, a description of FDR’s farm program, ran as follows: An Analysis of a Vicious Combination of Fascism, Socialism and Communism Which Cannot Be Harmonized with the Basic Principles of Constitutional Government in the United States . 10

  “If there are any items in the march of European collectivism that the New Deal has not imitated it must have been an oversight,” roared former president Herbert Hoover at the Republican convention in the summer of 1936. The administration was a hodgepodge of usurpations, declared a Liberty League pamphlet a short while later—a would-be “totalitarian state” along the lines of European dictatorships. 11

  At a white-tie dinner sponsored by the League, Al Smith, the failed Democratic presidential candidate of 1928, stepped before the microphones and let loose a torrent of red-baiting. The New Deal, Smith charged, had enacted Socialist rather than Democratic Party principles and was at war with basic American freedoms. It was OK with him, Smith clarified, if the administration’s “young brain trusters” wanted to “disguise themselves as Norman Thomas or Karl Marx, or Lenin, or any of the rest of that bunch, but what I won’t stand for is allowing them to march under the banner of Jefferson, Jackson, or Cleveland.” Nor would the country, with its proud democratic tradition. “You can’t mix socialism or communism with that. They are like oil and water.… They refuse to mix.” 12

  Smith had once been a close friend of Roosevelt’s, and his speech made the sort of splash that grand personal betrayals of this kind always do. But the image that stuck in the public mind was the glittering audience that had dressed up in evening clothes to applaud this son of the New York streets as he denounced his former pal. Among them was a Vanderbilt, a Guggenheim, an Aldrich, a Russian princess, and Jay Cooke IV; assorted bankers and industrialists and lawyers; the owner of the Washington Post . One couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the true nature of the Right’s hand-wringing over freedom and the Constitution. 13

  Ah, the poor, forsaken Constitution. Conservatives talked as though it were a covenant that had been handed down by God, but from which we had strayed thanks to the infernal temptations of FDR. Now the blight of economic depression was our punishment. “Whatever caused our past prosperity,” declared prominent attorney William H. Stayton in a 1935 Liberty League radio broadcast, “we know that there was a time when we obeyed our Constitution and were blessed above the rest of the world; and we know too that today our prosperity and happiness have given place to unemployment and distress which accompany our neglect of the Constitution.” 14

  The nation’s press joined in the chorus of rebuke, issuing invitations to the most extreme sort of political dread. The Los Angeles Times, to choose one paper, routinely made the darkest kind of accusations against the liberal president. Aghast at some long-forgotten episode of New Deal meddling in 1936, the paper announced that whether it was done with “deliberate intention of wrecking the social structure to let ‘collectivism’ inherit the earth, or whether it was merely inept blundering, makes little difference.” A few days after that, the Times suggested that Rooseveltian bad-mouthing of business constituted the same sort of “leadership” responsible for “Russia and Spain and Italy and Nazi Germany.” 15

  The way the Chicago Tribune urged panic upon its readers that year has become the stuff of legend. Here is how journalism critic George Seldes told the story in his 1938 book Lords of the Press :

  Every day the Tribune editorial page was a biased attack on Roosevelt with the heading “Turn the Rascals Out”; every day the Tribune telephone operators said “Good morning. Chicago Tribune . There’re only forty-three (or less) days left in which to save the American way of life.” Every day truthfulness, accuracy, impartiality, fair play and decency were flouted in the most vicious campaign against the President.

  In the Tribune ’s editorial cartoons, FDR could be seen marrying off “Miss Democracy” to a bristly-headed Communist; exploiting thuggish “Class Hatred” along with his Communist pals; denying everything though his hands were covered with “The Red Jam of Moscow.” On October 20, the Tribune ’s lead editorial was titled, “The Dictatorship Emerges”; the inevitable comparisons to Stalin and Hitler were duly made. A few days later, a Tribune editorial announced “It Will Happen Here, Unless—”; a column of full-throated red-baiting unfolded beneath. (“Some squeamish citizens resent calling such a program a program of communism, though that is obviously what it is.”)

  A front-page Tribune editorial just before Election Day declared, “You should realize that Nov. 3 is the most fateful day in the history of the American people. Do not consider that statement an exaggeration. If Landon is not elected you may have seen the last of free government as you have known it.” A nearby cartoon showed FDR happily urging a blindfolded Uncle Sam over a cliff marked “Dictatorship.” 16

  And then a shot right out of 1896. In the first of a long series of editorials titled “Turn the Rascals Out,” the Tribune declared that Election Day 1936 was “the chance to get rid of repudiators, devaluators, and inflationists, of the men responsible for the tampering with the national currency, the national credit, and the national honesty.” It was an almost exact repeat of the bill of grievances with which the nation’s newspapers had charged William Jennings Bryan.

  * * *

  OF COURSE, THE Liberty League and its spokesmen also tried to present themselves as the voice of ordinary people. They loved to quote Je
fferson, rail against tyranny, and cry out in the name of “that great big middle class we refer to as the backbone and rank and file,” as Al Smith put it at that ultra-fancy League dinner.

  The League’s elitism was obvious in its face, however. Its pamphlets proudly listed the names of the extremely wealthy individuals who sat on its National Executive Committee. And whatever cultural authority the organization had was derived not from its intimacy with the rank and file but from its relationship with the dignified and the credentialed, by which I mean distinguished scholars and high-ranking corporation lawyers.

  A consensus of the respectable was, as always, the form that the opposition to populism took, and in the publications of the Liberty League men of eminence and standing demonized the challenge to social hierarchy. Roosevelt represented mob rule, they said. Roosevelt violated norms and flouted the accepted boundaries of politics and economics. Roosevelt prioritized the shiftless and the lazy over the capable and the talented. Roosevelt coddled the weak and enslaved the strong. Roosevelt was mentally ill. * Roosevelt’s New Deal represented an uprising of the lower orders, who wanted merely to pillage their betters. Like Bryan before him, Roosevelt was the emblem of a world gone mad.

  At the pleasant resort of Sea Island, Georgia, at a 1935 meeting of the state’s bar association, nightmares of a world turned upside down—of the end of American civilization!—stalked through the heads of the ruling class. Liberty League official Ralph M. Shaw, a name partner at the Chicago mega-firm known today as Winston & Strawn, summed it up thus:

  The New Deal is … an effort sponsored by inexperienced sentimentalists and demagogues to take away from the thrifty what the thrifty or their ancestors have accumulated, or may accumulate, and to give it to others who have not earned it, or whose ancestors haven’t earned it for them, and who never would have earned it and never will earn it, and thus indirectly to destroy the incentive for all future accumulation.