Before Congress adjourned on its hundredth day, fifteen major pieces of legislation had been passed and signed into law. Billions of dollars were appropriated to undertake massive public works, provide direct work relief, ease mortgage distress, safeguard investors, guarantee bank deposits, ensure decent wages, provide collective bargaining, raise agricultural prices, generate public power. Relieve, ease, safeguard, guarantee, ensure: all words designed to bring comfort to those who were suffering, words that connoted policies that had begun to weave the vast safety net of protection and regulation that would eventually become the New Deal.
Contemporaries were boggled, filled with a sense of wonder upon witnessing the leadership exercised by Franklin Roosevelt during the hundred-day turnaround and beyond. Then, as now, one asks: How was it possible for a single man to give coherence to multiple layers of new programs cutting across the entire economic and social spectrum?
Be open to experiment. Design flexible agencies to deal with new problems.
First off, Roosevelt stressed the improvisational, experimental nature of the New Deal. Confronting the unmapped ocean of human distress the Depression had wrought, Roosevelt had “little in the way of precedent” to guide either the formulation or the execution of policies. With a bewildering array of sweeping laws to execute, he had no choice, he believed, but to experiment with unorthodox administrative practices. “We have new and complex problems,” Roosevelt explained. “We don’t really know what they are. Why not establish a new agency to take over the new duty rather than saddle it to an old institution?” Old-line departments were inevitably accustomed to familiar routines, established ways of thinking and acting. New agencies would be free to create new cultures built around innovation, vitality, and speed. In the course of his first eighteen months, Roosevelt would create twenty new agencies from “the alphabet soup” and give them names that would become known by their acronyms.
Roosevelt’s first venture—the Civilian Conservation Corps, popularly called the CCC—bore the signature of his personal invention. Frances Perkins once remarked that “every now and then” Roosevelt would have flashes “of almost clairvoyant knowledge and understanding.” The CCC, which linked all kinds of disparate things together in an original, romantic, yet practical program, was just such a concept. The program, when initially announced in March, aimed to provide work and purpose for 250,000 young men by mid-July. Most lived in cities, had recently left school, and were seeking “an opportunity to make their own way.” Nowhere could jobs be found, and they were listless and depressed. At the same time, dozens of national forests had fallen into “a sad state of neglect” over the years, to become choking third- and fourth-growth tracts of scrubland. Dead trees and shrubs had to be cleared, new trees planted, firewalls built, paths cleared.
The CCC would heal the forests while healing the young men. Since the greater portion of the wages would be sent home, earnings would simultaneously help families and stimulate local economies adjacent to the camps. A practical measure for the present and a material investment in the future, the CCC, as envisioned by Roosevelt, planted trees while more importantly planting “a moral and spiritual value” to uplift and sustain a generation of young men adrift.
When Roosevelt first described the plan to the cabinet, Perkins considered it “a pipedream.” How would a quarter of a million young men be recruited? How would they be transported to the forests, clothed, fed, and housed? Who would design and supervise the work projects? How could the program possibly be up and running in three months’ time? The answers to all such questions lay in Roosevelt’s leadership style: Establish a clear purpose; challenge the team to work out details; traverse conventional departmental boundaries; set large short-term and long-term targets; create tangible success to generate accelerated growth and momentum.
Over the course of several cabinet discussions, an overall method to actualize Roosevelt’s conception took shape. Four departments would contribute to this unique collaboration. The Labor Department was to select and enroll the young men from the relief rolls. Interior and Agriculture would recommend the work sites and design site-appropriate projects. The Army was to construct camps, transport, feed, clothe, house, and pay the men. Reserve Army officers would return to active duty to run the camps; the Interior Department was to select civilian foremen to oversee the work. To lead the CCC and coordinate the interdepartmental operations, Roosevelt shrewdly selected Robert Fechner, a union leader whose career had begun as a machinist. When Roosevelt asked him how long he needed to set up his first camp, Fechner replied, “a month.” Roosevelt countered, “Too long”; at once, Fechner halved the estimate. “Good,” Roosevelt said simply.
By calling for a quarter of a million men to occupy the forest camps by mid-July, Roosevelt challenged his team to exceed normal standards by setting a target beyond all conventional expectations. “Do it now and I won’t take any excuses,” he told them. “It was characteristic of him that he conceived the project boldly, rushed it through, and happily left it to others to worry about the details,” Perkins later said. “He put the dynamite under the people who had to do the job and let them fumble for their own methods.” And his entire team responded. By early July, Roosevelt proudly declared, more than 250,000 men were at work in 1,500 camps, “the most rapid large-scale mobilization of men in our history.” The Labor Department had managed to enroll ten thousand men daily until the target was reached. A cadre of talented officers, including Colonel George Marshall, had erected camps to accommodate more men than had been deployed in the Spanish-American War. The corps members, deeply engaged in a wide variety of conservation tasks, had found “a place in the world”—they were to make an enduring transformation of the infrastructure of public lands, improving timberland, securing flood and fire control, managing and conserving forestland for generations to come.
The CCC proved to be among the most popular of the New Deal programs. More than two and a half million young men would pass through the camps before the program was discontinued after the outbreak of World War II. Many of these men had never seen a forest before, let alone dwelled in a natural setting. Few had performed arduous manual labor. But, as Roosevelt had hopefully foreseen, they developed a broad range of job skills and learned to labor alongside others from different, hitherto unknown parts of the country. “I weighed about 160 pounds when I went there, and when I left I was 190,” said one boy, filled with a newfound sense of self-respect. “It made a man of me all right.”
Roosevelt understood, of course, that the CCC was not “a panacea,” for despite its initial success, the quarter of a million CCC jobs comprised but one-sixtieth of the problem of fifteen million unemployed Americans. To better illustrate the situation, he reverted to a sports analogy. He likened himself to the quarterback of a football team who “has a general plan of game in mind.” He knew what his first play was going to be but could not tell you the play after that “until the next play is run off. If the play makes ten yards, the succeeding play will be different from what it would have been if they had been thrown for a loss.” The resounding success of the CCC had provided an enabling first play in the intricate game plan that was just beginning to unfold for dealing with the colossal unemployment problem.
Stimulate competition and debate. Encourage creativity.
Roosevelt worked most productively, Sam Rosenman believed, when “ideas and arguments, pro and con, would be ‘batted out’ before him, discussed and debated.” He surrounded himself with strong personalities who fought hard for their own ideas, and then he deliberately contrived situations that challenged them to defend their opposing positions. Finally, of great importance, he steered them into reconciliation. Time and again, defying orthodox administrative protocol, he would give the same assignment to different people in the same agency or allocate the same project to different agencies. “There is something to be said for having a little conflict,” Roosevelt observed. “A little rivalry is stimulating, you know. It keep
s everybody going to prove that he is a better fellow than the next man.”
While Roosevelt himself never felt threatened by multiplicity and confusion, the “inherently disorderly nature” of his administration frequently disgruntled subordinates. At times, morale was threatened and feelings were rankled. “The maintenance of peace in his official family,” Roosevelt’s secretary Grace Tully remarked, “took up hours and days of Roosevelt’s time.” When he determined that a member of his team was feeling undervalued or under pressure, he sprang into action. He would invite the aggrieved aide to the White House for a “hand-holding session.” One administrator observed that Roosevelt “had a rare capacity for healing the wounded feelings which he had inadvertently caused.”
“In a quieter time, when problems were routine, there would have been every reason to demand a tight and tidy administration,” Schlesinger remarked. “But a time of crisis placed a premium on initiative and innovation and on an organization of government which gave these qualities leeway and reward.” By leaving lines of authority ambiguous, Roosevelt could simultaneously move in different directions; he could allow members of his spirited team to run, never doubting his ability to rein them in. Moreover, by refusing to delegate or consolidate too much power in a single person, he kept the ultimate decisions just where he wanted them—in his own hands.
Nowhere was Roosevelt’s competitive theory of administration illustrated more revealingly than in the struggle between two extremely able men—Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins—for control of the billions of dollars allocated to relieve unemployment through public works.
As secretary of interior and director of the Public Works Administration (PWA), Ickes had the perspective of a progressive businessman. The best way to attack unemployment, he believed, was to “prime the pump” by subsidizing private contractors to construct immense projects that would take an extended period of time to complete, but once accomplished, would endure. Such projects included the Bonneville Dam, the Lincoln Tunnel, LaGuardia Airport, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Harry Hopkins, a former social worker who headed the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and later the Works Progress Administration (WPA), favored a multifarious range of smaller and decentralized projects deliberately designed to get as many people off the relief rolls and into actual jobs as quickly as possible. Such speedily mobilized community-centered projects included many hundreds of schools, libraries, firehouses, playgrounds, skating rinks, and swimming pools. The Federal Arts Project sponsored painted murals for public buildings; the Federal Theatre Project enabled live productions of classical works to reach people in far-flung regions.
The contrasting administrative styles of the two men mirrored their differing philosophies and temperaments. Known as “Honest Harold,” Ickes was a seasoned administrator determined to restore the reputation of an Interior Department badly damaged by the Teapot Dome scandal during the Harding administration. Ickes insisted on meticulous planning; he micromanaged every contract, ever-watchful for waste or scandal. A scrupulous disciplinarian, he arrived early and remained late at his desk in the ornate Interior building. Until the voice of public disapproval was raised, he locked the front doors at 8:35 a.m. to prevent employees from wandering in late, and even removed bathroom stall doors to discourage employees from reading newspapers.
Hopkins, “a chain smoker and black coffee drinker” who occupied “the shabbiest building in Washington,” often looked as if he had slept at his desk, wearing “the same shirt three or four days at a time.” Impatient with bureaucracy and averse to organizational charts, he focused obsessively on “the physical, mental and spiritual suffering” caused by the dearth of jobs. He believed that direct relief in the form of the dole undermined character and independence and that men and women desperately wanted and needed the dignity of work and the discipline labor gave to one’s life. When critics complained that the CWA jobs were often of short duration with little impact on the long-run economy, he countered, “People don’t eat in the long run—they eat every day.”
Franklin Roosevelt valued, needed, and would utilize and reconcile the philosophies of both men. He sought both short- and long-term benefits—decentralized immediate work projects and centralized durable improvements—to help heal the nation. He participated directly in the allocation of funds by sitting on the committee that evaluated the competing projects submitted by the two men. He listened attentively when Hopkins argued that the heavy projects Ickes favored took too much time to develop, that with the higher cost of materials a lower percentage of dollars went directly into the pockets of people. He shared Ickes’s concern that Hopkins could not carefully oversee the tens of thousands of small projects he had initiated, exposing them to the risk of inefficiency, potential graft, and diminished congressional support.
As the Depression continued month after month, however, Roosevelt found himself siding more frequently with Hopkins. Roosevelt had always been susceptible to the stories of people’s lives rather than statistically driven macro-projects. Hopkins had a host of such stories for Roosevelt—how the provision of a government job had “rehabilitated” an entire family or how a WPA project had delivered a playground, park, or swimming pool to a grateful community. As appropriations tilted more to favor Hopkins’s myriad projects, Roosevelt was forced to placate Ickes. In his diary, Ickes records numerous occasions when he had resolved to resign, only to be reeled back into the fold by “the unaffected simplicity and personal charm of the man.” Here was the president of the United States, patiently listening to his side of the story, all the while being “dressed with the help of his valet,” yet remaining relaxed, focused, and empathetic to his personal grievances. “What could a man do with a President like that?” Ickes later said.
Long-smoldering antagonisms eventually ignited in public view. Ickes referred to WPA projects as “make-work” and “leaf raking.” Hopkins counterpunched, railing against the constant delays in the interior secretary’s construction projects. While the president valued, even fomented such arguments within his official family, he was less than pleased when feuds surfaced in newspapers. Within short order, he invited both Ickes and Hopkins to accompany him on a speaking tour across the country, followed by a cruise through the Panama Canal. The two men spent days and nights together with the president, game-fishing in the shoals off Mexico, palavering, playing poker, drinking martinis. Both men thoroughly enjoyed the intimacy of the unusual monthlong trip. Once again Ickes marveled at the “high cheer” of Roosevelt’s disposition as he was “being carried up and down like a helpless child when he went fishing.” Hopkins told his brother he had “a perfectly grand time” and felt “really rested.”
In the ship’s daily newspaper, The Blue Bonnet, a curious news item appeared, entitled “Buried at Sea.” Its sprightly style pointed directly to the old newspaperman, Roosevelt himself.
The feud between Hopkins and Ickes was given a decent burial today. With flags at half mast . . . the President officiated at the solemn ceremony which we trust will take these two babies off the front page for all time.
Hopkins expressed regret at the unkind things Ickes had said about him and Ickes on his part promised to make it stronger—only more so—as soon as he could get a stenographer who would take it down hot.
The President gave them a hearty slap on the back—pushing them both into the sea. “Full steam ahead,” the President ordered.
Open channels of unfiltered information to supplement and challenge official sources.
Don’t confuse what people in Washington are saying for what people in the country are feeling, Roosevelt repeatedly counseled his aides: “Go and see what’s happening. See the end product of what we are doing. Talk to people; get the wind in your nose.” If the unprecedented conditions demanded the creation of “new and untried” programs, Roosevelt, as chief administrator, had to figure out which of these programs were working, which were not. Such evaluations were not likely to bubble up th
rough formal channels. To prevent imprisonment within the official pipelines of information, Roosevelt set in motion a nationwide reconnaissance. He tapped all manner of unorthodox sources of intelligence that allowed him to alter, discard, or revamp existing programs on the fly.
Although he began his day by consuming a half-dozen metropolitan papers “like a combine eating up grain,” he relied on his longtime secretary Louis Howe to cut-and-paste a digest of articles and editorials culled from newspapers from small villages and towns across the country. Through this Daily Bugle, as it was called, Roosevelt absorbed a more personalized sounding of what people were feeling about individual New Deal programs. Similar clippings were compiled from the torrent of letters that reached the White House—somewhere between six and eight thousand letters every day after Roosevelt let it be known that he wanted to hear directly from the people. Eleanor also asked people to write her, citing the danger that a public figure “may be set apart from the stream of life affecting the country.” Her daily column not only dispensed advice but received opinions and suggestions from the people. She, like her husband, had opened two-way communications.
More than any other source, Roosevelt counted on Eleanor to provide “the unvarnished truth.” He called her his “will o’ the wisp” wife, for she traveled hundreds of thousands of miles around the country, spending weeks and months at a time talking with a great variety of people from every region, listening to complaints, examining New Deal programs, amassing an anthology of stories. Each time she returned, she arranged “an uninterrupted meal” with her husband so the anecdotes would be “fresh and not dulled by repetition.” Roosevelt had absolute trust in the dependability and accuracy of her observations. “She saw many things the president could never see,” Frances Perkins said. “Much of what she learned and what she understood about the life of the people of this country rubbed off onto the president.” Cabinet secretaries often heard Roosevelt’s refrain: “My missus gets around a lot,” he would say. “My missus says that people are working for wages way below the minimum set by NRA in the town she visited last week.”
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