The killings and beatings of CIO men continued throughout the year, and when all incidents had been reported to Secretary Perkins, she remarked that 1937 had been the most savage in the history of twentieth-century labor. It was in fact the high-water mark of the decade’s spectacular picket line confrontations. Of the 4,720 strikes in 1937, the Department of Labor estimated that 82 percent had ended in settlements favorable to unions. By the year’s end, nearly eight million workers were carrying union cards. “For the past four and one-half years,” Fortune observed late in 1937, “the United States has been in the throes of a major labor upheaval which can fairly be described as one of the greatest mass movements in our history.”
In 1941, when Ford and Bethlehem Steel were swept up in the tidal wave, there would be ten million union men; late in the 1940s the figure reached fifteen million. Lewis fell into public disfavor during the war, when he seemed to be blackmailing the President by threatening to withhold coal from war industries. The CIO, embarrassed to find that there really were some Communists in its ranks (Lee Pressman was for a time the CIO general counsel) was obliged to purge itself of them. Nevertheless, the original goal had been reached and was never again in jeopardy; American workmen had gained security and dignity, and with a new surge of prosperity they themselves would move to suburbs and join the expanding middle class.
Hardly anyone noticed when, on February 27, 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the sit-down strikes illegal. The circumstances at the time had seemed to render that point irrelevant. If labor had sometimes stepped outside the law in its great struggle, liberals could argue, then surely it had been provoked. Any suggestion that the sit-downs had been a form of collective violence was denied or shrugged off; any mention of other incidents in which labor was at least as guilty as management—such as the bloody strike against the Aluminum Company of America in Alcoa, Tennessee, or of jurisdictional disputes between AFL and CIO pickets—brought hostile stares.
But a people cannot escape its past so easily. Certain precedents had been established, and would be remembered. Nor were those precedents to be altered by the fact that union men had been acting in concert with American history. They were, but that would merely strengthen the resolve of the rebels of the future. Violence had brought the United States independence, freed the slaves, and first conquered the West and then tamed it. Now it had raised working men up from the industrial cellar. Labor might forget that and turn conservative, but for liberals to deny other oppressed groups the right to revolt would prove impossible. Thus were the seeds of later anguish planted in innocence, even in idealism.
By late summer of 1937 the President felt he had to get out of Washington for what he called a “look-see” trip. In September his air-conditioned ten-car train nosed out of Union Station and rolled westward, pausing at selected stations long enough for him to deliver his simple little discourses from the back platform, remind constituents of what the administration had done (“How do you like your new high school?”), and enjoy the warmth of their affection. At Boise he told his audience that he felt like Antaeus: “I regain strength just by meeting the American people.” Their enthusiasm seemed even greater than in the last campaign, and reporters, noting it, saw something else. Invitations to the presidential car were following an interesting pattern. Senators Burke of Nebraska, Wheeler of Montana, and O’Mahoney of Wyoming—Democrats who had fought FDR’s Supreme Court bill—were being deliberately overlooked. At Casper, Wyoming, the President told the crowd that voters didn’t have much use for politicians who gave lip service to ideals and then did nothing to put their ideals to work.
This was correctly interpreted as a threat to mutinous Democrats, though he didn’t follow it up immediately. As usual, Roosevelt’s mind was exploring several channels at once. He was pondering new legislation, looking toward the coming off-year elections, sifting the alternatives in foreign policy, watching the strikes, and brooding over his budget, which he had promised to balance in his first campaign. Until now that had been impossible, but he still wanted to do it if he could. This looked like the year. In its first months Time had reported: “Last week, with Depression lapsing into memory, the portents of Boom drummed excitingly throughout the land,” and now, in report after report, Morgenthau was noting a small but accumulating surplus in the Treasury. To be sure Leon Henderson, the WPA economist, was worrying about rising prices; he had written a troubled memorandum expressing fear of a business collapse. Roosevelt had seen it, but he didn’t want to renege again on the commitment to balance. During the Court fight he had assured Garner, “I have said fifty times that the budget will be balanced for the fiscal year 1938. If you want me to say it again, I will say it either once or fifty times more.”
The prescription was as wrong for Roosevelt as it had been for Hoover. Stocks slumped. The President was tempted to say that conditions were “fundamentally sound”—he really believed that they were—but then, remembering his predecessor, he held his tongue. It made no difference. On October 19, “Black Tuesday,” wave after wave of selling orders hit the market, the tape was twenty-five minutes behind the trading, and the backup of new selling orders indicated that bottom had not yet been touched. The following winter brought painful memories of 1929–30.
The New York Stock Exchange blamed the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC blamed the exchange, businessmen blamed a loss of confidence in the administration, New Dealers muttered darkly of a “capital strike.” Certainly the year’s real strikes, affecting 1,950,000 workers, had scarred the economy. In any event, the recession, as it was called, deepened the gloom in what was already a dark year for the President and the country. The skid downward was actually steeper than in the first months after the Crash. By the spring of 1938 five million people who had found jobs since 1933 were out of work again, and nearly 14 percent of the population was on relief.
It was hard for the President to abandon hope in a balanced budget, but Roosevelt was not Hoover; the spectacle of millions in want moved him more than Manchester economics ever could. And this was not 1930. A growing number of Democrats, including Henderson and the President’s son James, had become Keynesian advocates. FDR hadn’t read Keynes—he rarely opened a book when he could pick up the same information in conversation—and he was unimpressed by a long letter from England dated February 1, 1938 (“You received me so kindly when I visited you some three years ago that I make bold to send you some bird’s-eye impressions”), in which Keynes recommended massive deficit spending. It couldn’t be massive. In politics some goals, no matter how enchanting to the academy, are unattainable. Still, limited deficits had already passed Roosevelt’s supreme test: they worked. In 1934 and 1935 they had fueled better times, increasing the money supply and pushing indices up. With his advisers recommending a Keynesian solution, and with the recession deepening as 1938 grew older, the President capitulated. On April 2, lunching on the train between Warm Springs and Washington, he told Harry Hopkins and Andrew Williams, director of NYA, that he was going to quit trying to balance the budget. Twelve days later, in a fireside chat, he explained to the country that he planned to ask Congress for three billion dollars to increase public works, relief, flood control, and housing. In June the stock market came to life, and in eight months the Dow index spurted from 99 to 158. Happier days, if not happy days, lay ahead.
***
His critics were unimpressed. Long ago the most vociferous of them had turned aside from any serious inquiry into current affairs and abandoned themselves to orgies of presidential vilification. When he floated one of his little valentines for them the week after the April fireside chat—he attacked big business’s control over “other people’s money, other people’s labor, other people’s lives”—they salivated as predictably as a Pavlovian kennel. Keynes thought that very naughty of Roosevelt. In that February 1 letter he had attempted to advise the President on the management mentality. Businessmen were not snarling beasts, he wrote. It was best to treat them as
“domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.”
This was one Keynesian recommendation that Roosevelt didn’t even acknowledge. Let the Englishman stick to his last; FDR was the reigning expert on public opinion, and he wasn’t going to dangle olive branches before his sworn enemies. Anyway, by then it was too late to reconcile the quarrels between the President and the American business community. Too much had been said, too many slights inflicted, too many ritualistic needles rammed into waxen images, too many stakes driven into imaginary hearts.
Willard M. Kiplinger, whose weekly newsletter circulated in business offices, later dated the reaction against the administration among the well-to-do from March 1, 1934. By that September Time had noted that “Private fulminations and carpings against the New Deal have become almost a routine of the business day,” but the President himself was still too popular for open attacks upon him, let alone his family.
A stronger reaction was inevitable once the propertied classes had convalesced from their terror of early 1933 and discovered that by “recovery” FDR did not mean a return to New Era prosperity. He wanted changes, and those changes would benefit not the rich, to whose schools he had gone and in whose circles he had moved, but the oppressed. Talk of the Forgotten Man, businessmen agreed among themselves, merely fomented unrest. Anti-New Deal columns began appearing under the bylines of David Lawrence in U.S. News, Mark Sullivan in the New York Herald Tribune, and Frank R. Kent in the Baltimore Sun. The Saturday Evening Post was a particular haven for mourners of the past. One of its editorial writers declared indignantly, “We might just as well say the world failed as that American business leadership failed.” The Post published a spirited defense of child labor, insisting that “the surest prescription for starting an American boy toward understanding success is to let him go to work before he is fully grown,” and when Carter Glass said of New Dealers, “Why, Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t even speak to these people,” it was clear that opposition to Roosevelt was along class lines, not party lines.
The 1936 election returns indicated that excoriation of Roosevelt was counterproductive. It did not disappear, though. Instead it turned more virulent and went underground: to Westchester County and Orange County, Grosse Pointe and Miami Beach, Brookline and Longmeadow; Greenwich, Shaker Heights, Scottsdale, Kenilworth, and Winnetka; Wall Street, State Street, Chestnut Street, and La Salle Street. In lighter forms it could be amusing. There were the stories of the psychiatrist who went to heaven and was immediately sent to God “because He has delusions of grandeur; He thinks He’s Franklin D. Roosevelt,” and “Why is a WPA worker like King Solomon? Because he takes his pick and goes to bed.” When FDR saw the celebrated Peter Arno cartoon of the overdressed rich on their way “to hiss Roosevelt” at the Trans-Lux Theater, he scribbled “Grand!” across it.
But there was nothing grand about the anti-Roosevelt sewage being circulated in upper-class and upper-middle-class clubs and homes in the late 1930s. Of course, they told one another knowingly, everyone in Washington knew That Fellow had caught gonorrhea from “El-ea-nor.” (A Negro had infected her.) Franklin D. was dying of VD, and that was the reason El-ea-nor was gallivanting around the country; after he was dead she was going to turn the country over to the Russians. Then she was going to Moscow and learn unspeakable sexual practices, taught only in the Kremlin. “Jimmee” Roosevelt would probably stay; his protection racket, selling “insurance” to honest businessmen, was battening.
“One is apt to forget nowadays,” John Gunther wrote in 1950, “the furtive vindictiveness of the whispering campaign against Roosevelt, the sheer defamatory wickedness of the calumny that descended on him…. One forgets the atmosphere of the ‘better’ country clubs in the late 1930s, the ghoulish talk at the bankers’ lunches, the burble of poisonous gossip at fashionable dinners.” There were the Army officers who, even in uniform, refused to toast the President of the United States. There were the old men in mahogany-walled city clubs repeating the incantation, “Just another Stalin—only worse,” or “We might just as well be living in Russia right now.” There was even the Boston bookstore which informed Bennett Cerf, the President’s publisher, that it would sell FDR’s collected speeches “only if bound in that man’s skin.”
And over and over there were the clichés: That Man, That Fellow, trying to destroy the American way of life, you can’t spend your way out of a Depression, our children’s children will be paying, half the people on relief are foreigners anyhow, cut the relief rolls and enlarge the police and let trouble come, John L. Lewis has a key to the back door of the White House, That Man’s smile has been grafted on his face by plastic surgeons, he has never earned a nickel in his life and just lives off his mother’s income, and he’s only a Jew anyway, descended from Dutch sheenies who changed their names, nothing but a New York kike. (An elaborate genealogy was worked out for this last, going back to a fictitious Colonel van Rosenfeld.)
In two striking magazine articles (“They Hate Roosevelt,” Harper’s, May 1936, and “They Still Hate Roosevelt,” New Republic, September 14, 1938) Marquis W. Childs analyzed the haters. His first study cited “a phenomenon which social historians of the future will very likely record with perplexity if not with astonishment: the fanatical hatred of the President which today obsesses thousands of men and women of the American upper class. No other word than hatred will do,” he went on. “It is a passion, a fury, that is wholly unreasoning.” Childs suggested that “It permeates, in greater or less degree, the whole upper stratum of American society. It has become with them an idée fixe.”
What especially baffled him was that the majority of those who railed against the President had to a large extent “had their incomes restored and their bank balances replenished since the low point of March 1933.” The value of some stocks had doubled, tripled, or quadrupled—“and indeed has multiplied some of them by ten.” Corporate dividends were up over 40 percent. Thus far the incomes of the wealthy had not been heavily taxed. (A man who made $16,000 a year was taxed $1,000.) Much of the burden in Roosevelt’s tax programs had been passed along to the mass of consumers through processing or excise taxes.
Nevertheless the rich—Childs called them “the 2 percent”—regarded the administration of Washington as though it were an alien government. Indeed, in repeating the “Rosenfeld” myth they were quoting a Goebbels tract word for word. Some of them said outright that they would prefer Hitler to Roosevelt. While this was nonsense, it does suggest the depth of their feeling. Atwater Kent retired in June 1936 because he refused to do business while Roosevelt was President; a Du Pont vice president was honestly indignant when his servants left him because they could get more money from the WPA; a Bethlehem Steel executive had a heart attack when FDR was quoted—accurately for once—as saying of Bethlehem’s president, “Go tell Eugene Grace he’ll never make a million dollars a year again!” As Childs discovered, the fury of the rich was passed along to the middle-class white-collar workers who still believed in them, who had retained their faith in the shibboleths of the 1920s. Reviling Roosevelt became a status symbol among men who, unlike their “betters” (as the 2 percent were still called), were unthreatened by the labor unions and the transfer of power from financiers and big businessmen to Washington.
The President’s reaction to this was puzzling. In Madison Square Garden he had said that he welcomed their hatred, but he was not the kind of man to relish widespread detestation of anyone, let alone himself and his family. Childs wrote, “He doesn’t seem to mind.” There is some evidence that he did. Raymond Moley has left an account of how Roosevelt, planning a conciliatory address on the role of American industry, would listen to New Dealers repeat the stories going the rounds of Forsyte homes until his face stiffened and it became clear that the speech would be “more like a thistle than an olive branch.” The President told Norman Thomas that he was saving capitalism and resented the criticism of the capitalists. At one of his p
ress conferences he quietly handed around, with minimal comment, a “confidential backgrounder” from a national news service to subscribing editors hinting at proof that FDR had syphilis.
As long as he lived, the 2 percent and their admirers would be ready to spring on his most innocuous move. When in 1939 he proposed that Thanksgiving be celebrated a week early to extend the Christmas shopping season—a boon to small businesses—the country split wide open; twenty-five governors agreed, twenty-three revolted (including the governor of Maine, who ate a symbolic can of sardines), and the issue had to be solved by a joint resolution of Congress. Even in death there were those who reviled him. One of them was Harold Gray, creator of Little Orphan Annie. Shortly before the President was stricken in 1945, Daddy Warbucks, unable to stand the thought of another term under Roosevelt, threw himself to his death. After the President’s funeral, Gray brought Daddy back on the ground that “since the climate is different around here recently,” it would be possible for a man of property and decency to breathe freely again.
Daddy Warbucks and the man behind him belonged to what Teddy Roosevelt once called the lunatic fringe. Pearl Harbor thinned the ranks of the haters, who had reached their crest during the late 1930s. In the opinion of Frederick Lewis Allen, their rage “flared higher and higher during 1934 and 1935 and continued at a high temperature until about 1938, when it appeared to weaken somewhat, if only through exhaustion.” Meantime they had enjoyed FDR’s 1937 reverses as much as if they were reading Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and though they were disappointed by the swiftness with which his 1938 recession faded, they were to feast joyously on a Roosevelt defeat once again in the fall.
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