His purpose, which every decent businessman could endorse, was the elimination of cutthroat competition and the sweating of women and children. But the industry-by-industry codes inevitably meant the end of trust-busting and the return of price-fixing. Labor was jittery, so Donald R. Richberg, counsel for the Railway Brotherhoods, persuaded Johnson to write NRA’s historic section 7(a), legitimizing collective bargaining and thus providing impetus to the labor movement of the 1930s. Big business saw it coming. In Senate hearings the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce protested bitterly. Roosevelt summoned disputants and advocates of the bill to a White House conference, which lasted until they reached an agreement on wording. They emerged with 7(a) intact, but it was an inauspicious beginning. The industrialists and their legislative spokesmen had gone along only because some of them believed in abolishing all free enterprise. As Ralph Flanders, then president of the Jones & Lamson Machine Company, put it, they were “thoroughly sold on the idea that recovery and prosperity depended on the restraint of competition.”
Ironpants Johnson was such a superb showman that these prickly issues were undiscovered through most of 1933. Henry Wallace had told him about thunderbirds, and the general drew a blue eagle based on the old Indian ideogram. Under it he lettered the legend We Do Our Part. To the press he growled, “May God have mercy on the man or group of men who attempt to trifle with this bird.” Firms which complied with his codes were entitled to display blue eagles. Consumers affixed eagle decals on their windshields, Time printed the symbol on its covers each week. Four girls had it tattooed on their backs. In a San Francisco baseball park eight thousand children stood in formation to form a gigantic NRA eagle, and Busby Berkeley, not to be outdone, rewrote the finale of Footlight Parade so that Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, and every extra in Hollywood formed (1) the American flag, (2) the profile of FDR, and (3) Johnson’s eagle. It was dazzling, it was exhilarating, and with the general racing around the country getting his codes signed, it looked real.
Much of it was. By midsummer some nine million workers were under NRA work and wage codes signed by one million employers. But most of these were small businessmen. Of the ten largest industries—textiles, coal, petroleum, steel, automobiles, lumber, garments, wholesale trade, retail trade and construction—only textiles had signed up, and that had taken six weeks of furious campaigning. There were mutinous sounds in New Deal ranks; “Hugh,” said Hopkins, “your codes stink.” Indifferent to the blue thunderbird, coal mine guards were shooting miners, and Henry Ford refused to do his part. Johnson traded in his Lincoln for a Cadillac. The President ordered government departments and bureaus to do business only with NRA firms. A newspaperman asked Johnson what would happen to objectors who wouldn’t go along with the codes. Wiping beer suds from his lips, he snapped, “They’ll get a sock right on the nose.”
Then the general changed his strategy. He launched a nationwide campaign to pledge all employers to a twelve-dollar, forty-hour week; formal codification would come later. The President made it the subject of his third fireside chat, on July 24, 1933: “In war, in the gloom of night attack, soldiers wear a bright badge on their shoulders to be sure that comrades do not fire on comrades. On that principle, those who cooperate in this program must know each other at a glance.” The implication was plain—do your part or lie low. The NRA now took on an evangelical air. Mayor James Michael Curley assembled a hundred thousand children on Boston Common and led them in the pledge: “I promise as a good American citizen to do my part for the NRA. I will buy only where the Blue Eagle flies. I will ask my family to buy in September and buy American-made goods. I will help President Roosevelt bring back good times.”
Every community with any civic pride held an NRA parade, with floats and bands playing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” New York’s eclipsed all the rest. For ten hours two million New Yorkers watched a quarter-million marchers. Symphony conductor Walter Damrosch led the radio workers, Charles Winninger the actors, Al Jolson the motion picture employees. There were a thousand barbers; ten thousand bankers, brokers, and stock exchange clerks; and twenty thousand garment workers. At the reviewing stand, fifty carrier pigeons were released, carrying good wishes to FDR. Night fell, the Fifth Avenue lights went on, and still the delegations came tramping out of Washington Square—grocers, jewelers, pawnbrokers, butchers, firemen, policemen, librarians, druggists, book publishers, and bartenders. But you didn’t have to be in New York to feel the enthusiasm. In Tulsa, Hugh Johnson’s seventy-seven-year-old mother led the parade, warning, “People had better obey the NRA, because my son will enforce it like lightning, and you can never tell where lightning will strike.” Everywhere, wrote Heywood Broun, marchers felt hope and confidence: “When a line forms and your shoulder touches that of a fellow and a comrade, solidarity is about to be born.” Suddenly General Johnson was flooded with draft codes, two million of them. Every major industry endorsed the NRA except automobiles and coal; then the car makers joined (Ford remained an exception) and, finally, coal. In the general enthusiasm, even Herbert Hoover signed an NRA pledge.
Then came the reaction. Hoover changed his mind and decided that the NRA was totalitarian. Businessmen denounced it as “creeping socialism” and union leaders as “business fascism.” William Randolph Hearst charged that NRA stood for No Recovery Allowed. A writer for Harper’s Magazine toured four states and found that firms displaying blue eagles were guilty of monstrous NRA violations. Of the more than 700 codes, 568 had price-fixing clauses, which is presumably what Hopkins had had in mind. Walter Lippmann wrote of the NRA that “The excessive centralization and the dictatorial spirit are producing a revulsion of feeling against bureaucratic control of American economic life.”
What had happened? Earlier in the year columnists and industrialists had been begging the President to become a dictator. The difference now was that he had turned the country around; he was paying the price of success. During his first four months in the White House, the Federal Reserve Board’s adjusted index for industrial production had risen from 59 to 100. Brokers spoke of “the Roosevelt market.” Men who would have been too weak or too frightened to oppose Johnson in March were now dealing from strength. “We have had our revolution,” said Collier’s, “and we like it.” “Up go the prices of stocks and bonds, adding millions of value,” cheered the Literary Digest. “Up go the prices of wheat, corn and other commodities, putting millions into the pockets of Depression-harried farmers.” The Digest didn’t mention the AAA, which was directly responsible for farm price rises, but the New York Times declared that Roosevelt had turned an unprecedented crisis into a personal triumph: “That was because he seemed to the American people to be riding the whirlwind and directing the storm. The country was ready and even anxious to accept any leadership. From President Roosevelt it got a rapid succession of courageous speeches and achievements which inclined millions of his fellow citizens to acclaim him as the heaven-sent man of the hour.” Roosevelt, said Ray Moley, had saved capitalism.
The institution of the Presidency had been transformed. When Roosevelt rode up Capitol Hill bystanders clapped loudly; and Secret Service agent Richard Jervis, who had guarded Hoover for four years, said, “It sounds good to hear that again.” In August the President jauntily greeted a press conference with the announcement, “I have some rather grand news for you.” A year earlier it would have been incredible: a government 500-million-dollar issue of 3.25 percent bonds—the first long-term Treasury issue since September 1931—had been oversubscribed six times. Despite Hearst, there could have been no more decisive proof of business confidence in the New Deal. For the first time since 1929 businessmen were discounting the future. And why not? Nothing, it seemed, could blunt Roosevelt’s attack on the Depression. The Congress was his, and Thomas Reed Powell, professor of constitutional law at Harvard, declared that “In my judgment, there are sufficient doctrines of constitutional law to enable the Supreme Court to sustain any exercise
s of legislative or executive power that its practical judgment would move it to do.” If Professor Powell didn’t know, who did? The answer was Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Unfortunately, no one had thought to ask him.
Portrait of an American
ELEANOR
Her father was T.R.’s brother, her mother a famous beauty, and she was born Anna Eleanor Roosevelt in 1884. So sad, everyone said. Such an ugly child.
When visitors called she would hide and suck her fingers till her mother called, “Come in, Granny,” explaining to the guest, “She’s such a funny child, so old-fashioned that we call her Granny.” And the little girl would want to sink through the floor.
Her mother died of diphtheria when she was eight, her father died of alcoholism when she was nine. She was sent to live with her maternal grandmother, a strict disciplinarian. Until she was fifteen she had no friends her own age.
At eighteen she was presented to Society. Society shuddered. The girl was nearly six feet tall. Her voice was loud and scratchy. Her front teeth protruded. She wouldn’t use cosmetics. She giggled at odd times. Sometimes she burst into tears for no apparent reason. Her mind was going, the family said, and when Cousin Franklin proposed to her, his mother Sara fought the marriage for three years.
At the wedding, on March 17, 1905, Teddy gave the bride away. She had inherited his fantastic energy. Not proper in a woman, everyone clucked, and they disapproved of the way she spent it. Someone asked whether housekeeping bothered her. She said, “I rarely devote more than fifteen minutes a day to it.” Instead she worked among the poor. And while she was out of the house in 1913, her young husband fell in love with her part-time social secretary, Lucy Mercer.
Lucy married a rich old man named Rutherfurd in 1920 and next year polio crippled Franklin. Sara wanted him to give up public life, to retire to Hyde Park as a cripple, but the doctor told Eleanor that he should return to politics; she could serve as his eyes and ears. The two women struggled. Eleanor joined the Women’s Trade Union League, worked till she dropped for the Democratic party, and told Franklin that he must be governor. Sara’s benevolent dictatorship grew weaker. She wrote her brother, “Eleanor is in the lead.”
He was elected governor, then President.
And at the inaugural he arranged for a front-row seat and a private limousine for lovely Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd.
After the inauguration Eleanor visited the second encampment of the bonus marchers. She sang songs with them, and afterward they said, “Hoover sent the army, but Roosevelt sent his wife.”
The President could seldom tour the country, so his First Lady covered forty thousand miles every year, delivering lectures and visiting slums, nursery schools, playgrounds, sharecroppers. Franklin always questioned her closely when she returned; he jocularly gave her the Secret Service code name Rover.
“For gosh sakes,” said one goggle-eyed miner to another in a New Yorker cartoon, “here comes Mrs. Roosevelt!”
While she was away, Lucy called on the President.
In Washington, Eleanor held a press conference once a week for women reporters in the Treaty Room on the second floor of the White House. Her column, My Day, appeared in 135 newspapers. She wrote a question-and-answer page for each issue of the Woman’s Home Companion. As a radio personality she was second only to Franklin. Her twice-a-week broadcasts were sponsored by Sweetheart toilet soap, Simmons mattresses, Johns-Manville building materials, Selby shoes, and Pond’s cold cream; she gave all the money to the American Friends Service Committee. Once she kept two White House receptions going at once, moving back and forth between the connecting door.
The President would meet Lucy on roads beyond Georgetown and Arlington. Once his Washington to Hyde Park train detoured to a little-used siding at Allamuchy, New Jersey, so he could visit her at her estate.
Eleanor by now knew that she could have neither romance nor a close relationship with Franklin.
“Back of tranquillity lies always conquered unhappiness,” was her favorite quotation.
To her admirers she was mother, wife, politician, stateswoman, journalist, and First Lady—all at once, and often all at the same time. She broke more precedents than her husband, had a greater passion for the underdog, and was always a little farther to the left. Once at Hyde Park she debated with Winston Churchill the best way to keep peace in the postwar world. By an Anglo-American alliance, said he; by improving living standards throughout the world, said she.
Her critics, led by Westbrook Pegler, called her a busybody, a do-gooder, a bleeding heart. Cartoonists drew savage caricatures of her. Anti-Eleanor jokes were cruel: “Eleanor can bite an apple through a picket fence.” In London, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy said she was the greatest cross he bore—“She’s always sending me a note to have some little Susie Glotz to tea at the embassy.”
Once she wondered whether her outspokenness might be a liability to Franklin. (At the time she was defending the right of Americans to be Communists.) He chuckled and said, “Lady, it’s a free country.”
She was at a meeting of Washington clubwomen when word came that he had died in Warm Springs.
In the White House she learned that Lucy had been with him at the end. She wept briefly; then, as always, she steadied herself.
Wounded by her mother, her father, her mother-in-law, and her husband, she now embraced all humanity. She continued her column, wrote fifteen books, reformed Tammany Hall, and represented the United States at the United Nations. Year after year in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, American women voted her the woman they most admired. Gallup reported she was the most popular woman in any part of the world.
Aged seventy-four, she wrote, “We must regain a vision of ourselves as leaders of the world. We must join in an effort to use all knowledge for the good of all human beings. When we do that, we shall have nothing to fear.”
Four years later she was dead. “Her glow,” said Adlai Stevenson, had “warmed the world.” The U.N. stood in silence in her honor. The three Presidents who had succeeded her husband bowed their heads as her coffin joined his in the Hyde Park garden. Over both stood a stone with an inscription she had chosen: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Lucy was absent. She had died in a New York City hospital fourteen years earlier.
THREE
Stirrings
In May 1934 the first comics magazine, Famous Funnies, appeared on American newsstands. Its readers did not include J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The nation’s top cop enjoyed comics—his favorites were Dick Tracy and Secret Agent X-9—but he had little time for them that spring. Hoover had his hands full getting ready to move the Justice Department into its new building on Pennsylvania Avenue, carrying out a presidential order to keep an eye on Fascist organizations, studying the new crime control acts just passed by Congress, and absorbing into his FBI agents from the now defunct Prohibition Bureau. The director wanted all the help he could get. “The criminal in America is on the march,” he had told the public, and the public could only agree. It had hoped that prohibition repeal would wipe the dark stain of violence from the American national character. Instead, the bootleggers turned to holding up banks. The reputation of bankers being what it was, the thieves were widely regarded as Robin Hoods; an Indianapolis admirer of the FBIs Public Enemy Number One wrote, “Dillinger does not rob poor people. He robs those who became rich by robbing poor people. I am for Johnnie.”
Johnnie’s record of ten shootings, four bank stickups, and three jailbreaks ended when he lost a confrontation with the fastest guns in the FBI, led by Melvin Purvis. The lesson should have been obvious, but as a national commission was to find thirty-five years later—amid what could hardly be called a serene era—public tolerance of violence during the 1930s was the highest in American history. Dillinger was more dangerous dead than alive. He became a kind of folk hero, and people who had never even seen a pistol spoke casually of the rod, the roscoe, the equal
izer, or the heat. Farmers had demonstrated that direct action worked; now all sorts of people were advocating it, including the governor of California, who congratulated a lynch mob for doing “a good job.” Chester Gould, Dick Tracy’s creator and therefore presumably a man after J. Edgar Hoover’s heart, said, “Big gangsters were running wild but going to court and getting off scot-free. I thought: why not have a guy who doesn’t take the gangsters to court but shoots ’em?” If it came to that, why not shoot anybody big who angered you? An alarming number of letters threatened Eleanor Roosevelt; on the advice of the Secret Service, she never left White House grounds without a roscoe of her own in her purse.
It was symbolic that Dillinger had been equalized while leaving a theater featuring a gangster movie. Hollywood was churning out fifty such films each year, many of them casting crime in a romantic light. Opinions about the director’s other gifts have varied, but no one ever doubted his genius for public relations. In 1934 the bureau’s files were opened for the producers of G-Men, a new kind of movie with the part of an FBI man played by an appealing young actor named James Cagney. Then the director turned to radio. Melvin Purvis was dispatched to appear on the Fleischmann Yeast Hour. This was a near disaster; Purvis horrified Hoover and inflamed ulcers at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency by belching into the microphone. On the other hand, a program called Gang-busters proved to be immensely popular. Dick Tracy himself could be heard during the children’s hour; millions of children sent in Quaker Oats box tops for detective badges. But the country’s flesh-and-blood super-sleuth was still Hoover himself. He was constantly running around the country, drawing up public enemy lists, and pursuing such outlaws as “Pretty Boy” Floyd, “Baby Face” Nelson, “Ma” Barker, “Machine Gun” Kelly, and—last and least in those days—Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.
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