“Too often, life in New York is merely a squalid succession of days,” La Guardia said, “whereas in fact it can be a great, living, thrilling adventure.” Under the swashbuckling five-foot-two-inch mayor, it became an adventure in light opera. He wore a black sombrero, shouted his commands in an incongruously shrill voice, and carried out his duties with piratical dash. One minute after he was sworn in he ordered the arrest of Lucky Luciano, the eminent hood. He used the city’s building, fire, and health departments to help striking waiters. When laundry owners begged him to be neutral in a dispute over their sweatshop wages, he blandly picked up his telephone and ordered his water commissioner to show the city’s impartiality by turning off the water in all laundries. (The owners settled immediately.) He ruled Manhattan like a laird, leading police raids in person, showing up without notice to preside over night court sessions, reading comic strips over the radio to children, and hanging on the back of a racing fire engine, an outsize helmet on his head. La Guardia’s hymn was “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” His flair for the dramatic, even the preposterous, sometimes camouflaged his advocacy of socialism, yet none who worked with him ever doubted his views or his effectiveness.
The elected radicals allied themselves with the New Deal; the doctrinaire left kept its distance. Contemplating Marxism and FDR’s experimentation, the New Republic stated flatly, “There is no middle course.” When Tugwell boasted of the administration’s aversion to “blind doctrine,” James Wechsler, then the Marxist editor of Columbia’s student daily, wrote that doctrine was precisely what the New Deal needed, and I. F. Stone and Max Lerner enthusiastically agreed. More than thirty years before Herbert Marcuse roused the New Left with his call for “selective tolerance,” Lincoln Steffens said, “Get the notion of liberty out of your heads…. We want liberty for us, but not for Hitler and Mussolini.” The New Masses used even more Marcusian language: “We would deny democratic rights to Fascists, to lynchers, to all those who wish to use them as a means of winning mass support for reaction.”
Tom Wolfe, who was three years old at the time, would one day write a brilliant article for the New York Magazine about “radical chic.” Wolfe had Leonard Bernstein and the Black Panthers in mind, but the concept was equally valid in the mid-Thirties. Hede Massing, a Soviet agent, was startled and amused when one of her earnest socialite protégés in the State Department sang “The International” to her in Russian from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. As Budd Schulberg was to note in The Disenchanted, face styles had even changed among intellectuals since the Twenties; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “sleek, shiny, Arrow Collar perfection, finely etched, sharp-featured, a pretty-boy face drawn with the symmetry of second-rate art, pear-shaped, with a straight nose, cleft chin, dark hair parted smartly down the middle, combed back and plastered down with Vaseline or Sta-comb,” had been replaced by the heavy bone structure, unruly hair, and Slavic features of the proletarian image. Indeed, wrote Frederick Lewis Allen, if you listened carefully at certain cocktail parties “you might have heard a literary critic who had been gently nurtured in the politest of environments referring to himself as a proletarian, so belligerently did he identify himself with the masses.” At dinner parties in New York’s elegant upper Eighties the most recent caller at the Communist party’s headquarters at 35 East Twelfth Street would be the cynosure of all artistic eyes, and if in his cups he could always find comradely voices to join him in the rousing refrain:
To make it Soviet
One more S in the USA
Oh, we’ll live to see it yet.
When the land belongs to the farmers
And the factories to the working men—
The USA when we take control
Will be USSA then.
The threat from the left was absurd, if colorful; the rightist threat was inchoate, if greater in potential. As the 1934 off-year elections approached, the most persistent criticisms of the New Deal came from businessmen. During the Hundred Days, most of them had approved of Joseph Medill Patterson’s moratorium on harassment of the administration; in his New York Daily News he had promised, “Whatever President Roosevelt does or doesn’t do, we’re going to be for him. We’re going to withhold hostile criticism for one year at least.” Now over a year had passed, and on reflection they decided they didn’t much like FDR’s paraphrase, in his inaugural, of Matthew 21:12—“The moneychangers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.” The first to speak out had been Al Smith. In a December 1933 editorial in his New Outlook Smith scorned the New Deal’s proliferation of acronyms: “It looks as if one of the absent-minded professors had played anagrams with the alphabet soup.” He had added, “Some of my readers may ask why others have not pointed out the dangers in the CWA program. The answer is very simple. No sane official who has hung up an empty stocking over the municipal fireplace is going to shoot Santa Claus just before a hard Christmas.”
“The hell they won’t,” Hopkins said dryly. “Santa Claus really needs a bullet-proof vest.” Roosevelt himself wrote to one of his ambassadors, “The inevitable sniping has commenced, led by what you and I would refer to as the Mellon-Mills influence in banking and certain controlled industries.” Congress approved increased relief spending in 1934, but the SEC battle thickened the ranks of snipers. On June 8 the President was sufficiently concerned to postpone his request for social security and its payroll tax until the following winter. It didn’t matter; no truce was possible now; two months later the American Liberty League convened in Miami and declared formal war. “All the big guns have started shooting,” Roosevelt wrote William C. Bullitt in Moscow. “Their organization has been labeled the I CAN’T TAKE IT CLUB.”
Sometimes he asked them to take a lot. Jesse Jones of his revitalized RFC castigated a meeting of financiers in Chicago, telling them that they were failures on their own terms, reminding them that half the audience represented institutions that had failed, and demanding that they “Be smart for once” and “take government into partnership with you.” Perhaps the point of no return in Roosevelt’s break with Wall Street was reached on October 24, 1934, when four thousand members of the American Bankers Association met in the DAR’s Constitution Hall to hear FDR himself. Jackson E. Reynolds, president of the First National Bank of New York, delivered an introduction which can only be described as obsequious. He told the President that the financial community was in a “chastened and understanding mood” and actually thanked him for everything the New Deal had done to “rescue and rehabilitate our shattered banking structure.” Roosevelt’s reply was one of his more unfortunate lapses into Endicott Peabodyism, asking for an alliance of all economic forces in the nation, including business, banking, labor, capital, and government. “What an all-America team that would be!” he exulted—as though Ironpants Johnson had not just led precisely such a team to a dismal string of defeats. The applause was polite, though the bankers felt Reynolds’s surrender had gone too far. Then, back in their hotels, they learned that they had been sold out. The White House had insisted upon censoring Reynolds’s speech in advance, deleting such wry asides as his recollection of the days when he had been a Columbia law professor and Franklin Roosevelt his less than perfect student. Neither for the first nor the last time, FDR had been too clever for his own good.
Business baiting of the President mounted in the last days of the 1934 election campaign, but the great middle class was largely unaware of it. In a masterly fireside chat he said, “I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for so many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few.” At the same time he praised “the driving power of individual initiative and the incentive of fair private profit.” Republicans were rediscovering that it was impossible to come to grips with such an opponent, and a note of ugliness began to creep into some of their speeches; in Wisconsin a Republican nominee bitterly referred to Roosevelt as “a man who can’t stand on his own two feet without crutches
.” FDR, knowing that such tactics could boomerang, thought Democrats would do well at the polls, though even he was surprised by the results. On the morning of November 7 the country awoke to find that the party in power had actually increased its congressional margins to 229 seats in the House and 44 in the Senate; the Republicans were left with only seven governorships. Among the thirteen freshman senators, all Democrats, was Harry S. Truman of Missouri.
In his preelection fireside chat Roosevelt had questioned the price-fixing aspects of the NRA. Johnson then resigned—he assembled his employees in the Commerce Department auditorium and tearfully quoted, in Italian, the dying words of Madame Butterfly before she committed hara-kiri—and was replaced by Averell Harriman. The departure of old Ironpants made little difference. The NRA was due to expire in June 1935 anyway, and before it could die with dignity the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. Implications of that decision were ominous only insofar as they affected other New Deal legislative achievements. The execution of the blue eagle—which left as its only legacy trade-in allowances for buyers of new cars—was in many ways a relief. By then it had been superseded by the acts of the Second Hundred (actually a hundred and seventy-seven) Days of 1935.
Planning for those days was begun by Roosevelt and Hopkins in the wake of the election returns, which could only be interpreted as a mandate. The general goals of the new laws were to be a more sensible use of national resources, security against unemployment and old age, and slum clearance and better housing. The chief beneficiaries would be labor and the small farmer. Roosevelt sketched its broad outlines in his State of the Union message to the new, heavily Democratic Congress on January 4, 1935. Then he and his aides began drafting the bills. They were not the same aides who had dazzled the capital two years earlier. Moley, Tugwell, Acheson, Richberg, Berle, Douglas, and Johnson were gone or going. The new New Deal required different talents, which the President found in, among others, Felix Frankfurter, James M. Landis, Marriner S. Eccles, Tom Corcoran, and Ben Cohen. Cohen and Corcoran lived together in what soon became famous as “the little red house on R Street.” They reminded Fortune of “those minor state counselors in Shakesperian comedies who serve the Duke, make astute comments, and are always perturbed at developments.”
There was plenty of perturbation, but it lay elsewhere, notably in the Washington offices of the Liberty League and other conservative strongholds. The Holding Company Act provided a good example of how far big business would now go in fighting Roosevelt. It applied to public utilities and included a five-year “death sentence” clause which provided that any holding company not able to prove its usefulness to its community within that time would be dissolved. Opposition appeared on several different levels. On the most dignified plane there was Wendell L. Willkie, then a utilities attorney, with a counterplan for state regulation. Several notches down was the utilities lobby, which, the Scripps-Howard Washington bureau reported, employed more agents than there were senators and congressmen. Finally, at the very bottom, were the forgers of fake messages from voters. This extraordinary campaign almost killed the bill. It cost the utilities nearly two million dollars; they sent out 250,000 telegrams and five million letters demanding rejection of the death sentence. Senator Truman alone received 30,000 such appeals. He burned them and remained loyal to Roosevelt. The House at first rejected the death sentence, however, and changed its mind only after a congressional committee headed by Hugo Black proved that the mail response was a fraud.
Social security was the most emotional issue that session. Republicans protested that if the administration bill were passed, children would no longer support their parents, the payroll tax would discourage workmen so much that they would quit their jobs, and that, taken all in all, the measure would remove the “romance of life.” Throughout the rest of his life Roosevelt was especially proud of his battle for social security, and in retrospect it seems the greatest of his legislative achievements. But it was a battle hard won. Every conceivable argument was raised against it, including militant interruption of hearings; Frances Perkins was testifying in its behalf before a congressional committee when a woman leaped up and shouted that the bill had been copied, word for word, from “page eighteen of the Communist Manifesto, which I have right here in my hand, Mr. Chairman.”
Coolidge-Hoover prosperity had identified the Republican party with big business, and as 1935 advanced into spring and then summer, antagonism toward FDR welded the two together. Utility lobbyists were so successful in their whispering campaign charging the President with insanity that by July the Washington press corps was being badgered by hometown offices inquiring whether Roosevelt had in fact lost his mind. The handful of Republicans in the Capitol took turns excoriating the New Deal’s plan to “sovietize America.” When Roosevelt proposed to raise income taxes in the higher brackets and introduce an inheritance tax, Hearst branded the program “essentially Communism,” a “bastard” measure attributable to “a composite personality which might be labeled “Stalin Delano Roosevelt.”
The Senate struck out the inheritance tax and reduced assessments in the top brackets, but FDR got most of what he wanted that session. Among the fruits of the Second Hundred Days were the Soil Conservation Act, a National Resources Board; a strengthened Federal Reserve Board; the Rural Electrification Act, which eventually brought electricity to a million farm families; the Guffey-Snyder Coal Act, which superseded the NRA in the mining industry; the Wagner-Connery Act, replacing section 7(a) and establishing a National Labor Relations Board; and the National Youth Administration, providing employment for youths from relief families and part-time jobs for needy students. Lyndon B. Johnson, who had just moved his young wife Lady Bird into a two-room apartment with a rollaway bed at 1910 Kalorama Road N.W., was appointed NYA administrator for the state of Texas, where he would soon meet and hire, at 17 cents an hour, a sharecropper’s son named John B. Connally Jr. (The North Carolina administrator was more openhanded with Richard Nixon, who had moved from Whittier to Duke Law School; Nixon’s NYA job paid 35 cents an hour.)
“Boys, this is our hour,” a grinning Hopkins had told his staff after the off-year triumph. “We’ve got to get everything we want—a works program, social security, wages and hours, everything now or never. Get your minds to work on developing a complete ticket to provide security for all the folks of this country up and down and across the board.” Despite charges that Hopkins used relief money to buy votes—Republicans insisted he had said, “We will tax, tax, spend, spend, and elect, elect”—he went to great lengths to keep the WPA above politics. Nevertheless, those who had been saved from want could hardly fail to be grateful, and it was in these early months of 1935 that Roosevelt turned the Democrats into the country’s majority party by forging his grand coalition of labor, the South, women, ethnic minorities, city bosses, and Negroes.
Viewed from the 1970s, FDR’s appeal to blacks may seem baffling. They were evicted from farms under the AAA crop reduction policies, and subject to new forms of discrimination by southern Democrats administering New Deal programs in Dixie. At its inception in June 1934, the Federal Housing Administration introduced restrictive clauses into its housing contracts. At the Warm Springs railroad depot there were separate toilets, waiting rooms, and even baggage rooms for “colored.” New Dealers were lukewarm about anti-lynching bills; in 1934 Louis Howe buried one in his files with the note: “Not favored at this time—may create hostility to other crime bills.”
Roosevelt benefited largely from comparison with Hoover, whom Walter White of the NAACP had called “the man in the lily-White House.” (During his four years in the Executive Mansion Hoover had declined to speak to the two Negro porters there.) The Republicans continually promised to protect the Negro’s economic status, which, as Jonathan Daniels observed, “was exactly what he wanted to escape.” Championing of black causes by Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and Harold Ickes helped; Ickes desegregated the Interior Building cafeteria and brought Robert We
aver into the administration. Negroes were accepted by the CCC and WPA, social security was color-blind, Howard University received a three-million-dollar government grant, relief projects built schools for blacks, and three hundred thousand Negro adults learned to read under a New Deal emergency education program. It was all tokenism, perhaps, but blacks hadn’t been able to get even tokens in the past.
The formation of every presidential cult is met by its opposite, and so it is with coalitions. By the end of the Second Hundred Days the first anti-Roosevelt bloc had emerged. It was a loose alliance of the Liberty League, Townsendites, William Dudley Pelley’s anti-Semitic Silver Shirts, the Hearst press, admirers of red-baiting Elizabeth Dilling, Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth movement; the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, Long’s chief lieutenant; and Father Charles E. Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice, formed on November 11, 1934. The Liberty League supplied much of the money. Followers were recruited from the lower middle class—often from the same neighborhoods which were to support Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in the early 1950s, Governor George Wallace in the late 1960s, and Spiro Agnew in the early 1970s.
During the Second Hundred Days the anti-Rooseveltians scored twice—both times in the name of isolationism, then at the height of its appeal. Defying the President’s reluctance to have his hands tied in foreign affairs, they lobbied through the Neutrality Act of 1935, which required him to prohibit arms traffic with nations at war and to forbid American citizens to travel on belligerent vessels, except at their own risk. The measure was immediately applied to the Ethiopian War. In the second instance, they turned back an FDR appeal to Congress asking American adherence to the World Court. On the Senate floor Long enlisted the support of Hiram Johnson and Borah; in the nationwide mail campaign Will Rogers joined Hearst and Father Coughlin. The Radio Priest claimed rejection of the Court as a personal victory, and since his audience at the time was estimated at 45 million listeners, his claim was undisputed.
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