***
Clearly the New Deal was on its last legs. The two Hundred Days periods had just about exhausted the administration’s legislative creativity; the few presidential measures which hadn’t passed contravened the growing conservatism in the country. Reforming zeal was nearly dead on the Hill. Only a man with Roosevelt’s extraordinary gift for leadership could have held his huge, amorphous coalition together in November 1936. Next time only a war would keep it intact. The South was its weak link, and the conservative bloc fused in the Court reform fight was developing stronger ties each month.
Congressman Martin Dies of Texas, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, explained that it would be incorrect to identify the bloc as southern, because it had “the support of nearly all small-town and rural congressmen.” Its enemies, he continued, were “the men from the big cities which… are politically controlled by foreigners and transplanted Negroes,” whose “representatives have introduced insidious influences into the New Deal.”
The influences had been there all along; it was the congressmen who had changed. As one embittered New Dealer put it, “The farmers have forgotten that they were just as hungry and desperate as the people in city slums before the President bailed both out.” It was true, but irrelevant. The anti-urbanism which Dies expressed was a powerful new force in the country, and in its hostility to the ways and ideas of city slickers, it was essentially conservative. Opinion polls in 1938 reported that while the President retained his popularity, his methods and his power were being questioned. Furthermore, the quality of his support had changed. According to a Fortune survey, about 62 percent of the voters were still for him, but those who felt he was essential—as against those who believed merely that the good in his administration outweighed the bad—had dropped from 34.9 to 17.7 percent. There had been little faith in pollsters since the Literary Digest debacle, but the coming off-year campaigns would confirm the trend, and congressmen who read their mail could sense it.
The last New Deal reform measure was the Fair Labor Standards Act, introduced early in 1937. It had a dreadful time. It provided for a forty-cent hourly minimum, a maximum work week of forty hours, with time and a half for overtime and no labor for children under sixteen. Employers were to be given eight years to meet the standards, starting with twenty-five cents an hour. In retrospect it does not seem Draconian. All the same, it was first forgotten in the battle over the Court plan, and then pigeonholed by southerners from low-wage states. FDR called Congress back into special session after his “look-see” trip convinced him that the country was behind him. The wages-and-hours law came up in the House and was trounced. It came up again, and lost again. Finally, in late June of 1938, it was sent to the White House for Roosevelt’s signature.
By then he had decided he must do something about the Hill. Good Democrats up for reelection must win; the others should leave Washington. In the spring he had written a “Dear Alben” letter to Barkley, who faced a popular primary candidate in Kentucky’s Governor A. B. “Happy” Chandler. Alben’s opponent, Roosevelt wrote, was “a dangerous person… of the Huey Long type, but with less ability.” Next he invited John L. Lewis to the White House and persuaded him to put his men and his money behind Barkley. Finally—or it should have been final—FDR announced that he would personally stump Kentucky to campaign for Alben. Unhappily local WPA administrators, eager to please the chief, also showed favoritism toward Barkley, and this blunder was documented in the Scripps-Howard press. It was an ugly overture.1
The entire country learned firsthand of the President’s determination to intervene in local primaries through a fireside chat late in June 1938. Democrats in the 75th Congress, he reminded the electorate, had been elected by running on an “uncompromisingly liberal” platform. Citing the year-long battle over wages and hours, he said, “Never before have we had so many Copperheads.” Copperhead was not a flattering term; it meant people in northern states who sympathized with the South during the Civil War. He explained liberal principles and then said that “as head of the Democratic party” he felt that he had “every right to speak in those few instances where there may be a clear issue between candidates for a Democratic nomination involving these principles, or involving a clear misuse of my own name.”
That was all. Yet newspaper editorial writers, who had popularized the phrase “Court pack” so successfully that most readers did not know it had been introduced as a measure for Court reform, promptly christened this new venture a “purge”—thus inviting dark comparisons with the bloody events in Moscow a year earlier. To read some papers one would have thought that the President intended to bound back and forth across the land with a sickle, lopping off the heads of inoffensive men who had been audacious enough to disagree courteously with him once in a while.
And yet—one wonders precisely what FDR did have in mind. Jim Farley, who knew when to leave a ship, fled to Alaska, groaning, “It’s a bust.” By any gauge of conventional politics, it was. Here was the leader of a national party—generally regarded as the most skillful politician ever to occupy the White House—deliberately inviting reverses. In off-year campaigns local personalities are usually far more important than national policy. Issues also tend to be local, and in 1938 there was a bewildering array of them: corruption in Pennsylvania, a state pension plan in California, the sit-downs in Michigan, a Rhode Island race track scandal, bribery in Massachusetts, bossism in New Jersey, strikes everywhere, and, in Connecticut, an uproar over a revolutionary proposal to build a four-lane, fifteen-million-dollar landscaped highway through the townships of Greenwich, Stamford, New Canaan, Norwalk, Westport, Fairfield, and Trumbull. As James MacGregor Burns has noted, “Putting out campaign brush fires all over the country was no way to leave the President in a commanding position.”
But to Roosevelt this was no ordinary campaign. Ever since the Court fight he had been planning a realignment of the parties. Most conservatives were Republicans; let that party be their home. He saw the Democratic party as the instrument of liberalism. As the first national hero of peace, he was ready to spend his popularity in a gigantic political reform, and the first stage of his crusade was encouraging. His appeal to the people was undiminished. Everywhere crowds were unprecedented. In Marietta, Ohio, an elderly woman knelt to pat the dust where he had stepped; in Idaho, where the railroad tracks ran beside a quiet lake, a man had erected two American flags on a tiny homemade pier, and as the presidential car passed he stood at attention between them, his hand raised in a military salute.
FDR gave Happy Chandler the back of his hand. Chandler was so thick-skinned, and so determined to seize a piece of the President’s coattails, that he had to be all but kicked and dragged from the platform. It was done, and Roosevelt leveled him with such magnificent scorn that Kentuckians could have no doubt about the presidential choice. In Texas the hallowed hands fell on the brows of Congressmen Lyndon B. Johnson and Maury Maverick; Senator Tom Connally, who had voted against the Court plan, was almost incoherent with rage when he heard Roosevelt announce—and from the train’s rear platform at that—the appointment to the federal bench of a Texan the senator loathed. In Oklahoma, Colorado, Nevada, and California blessings were bestowed more discreetly, and one marked man, Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, demonstrated that he was a better athlete than Chandler by actually fighting his way to FDR’s side. On the whole the President’s surgical job had been well done, however, and boarding the warship Houston the commander in chief wore a triumphant glow. In the big races, including Kentucky, his men had won. McCarran had barely slipped in, and in lesser contests little presidential prestige had been committed.
Now he was prepared to commit a lot. In Barnesville, Georgia, he cast the evil eye on Senator Walter George while George sat on the same platform. When FDR finished reading him out of the party, the senator said, “Mr. President, I regret that you have taken this occasion to question my democracy and to attack my public record. I want you to know that I accept
the challenge.” “Let’s always be friends,” FDR replied fatuously. The rest of the Georgia politicians present were jittery; they were trying to think how on earth they could survive such a feud. Traveling north, Roosevelt hexed “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina and Millard Tydings of Maryland. In early September he spent two days speaking against Tydings, a man who, he charged, wanted to campaign “with the Roosevelt prestige and the money of his conservative Republican friends both on his side.” His New York scourge was Congressman John J. O’Connor, who, although he was the brother of the President’s former law partner, had used his position as chairman of the House Rules Committee to bottle up New Deal legislation.
Then the people voted. The result, for FDR, was calamity and humiliation—the only election in which it can be said that the President was crushed. Of the ten principals marked for the political void, only O’Connor fell, brought down by an attractive candidate backed by La Guardia, Hopkins, Corcoran, and boss Edward J. Flynn. All the rest, including Tydings, George, and the medieval Smith, coasted in on landslides or sweeps. The southern Democratic party, with an identity all its own, was a mighty force now. Of it, President Kennedy was to observe ruefully in 1962, “Some Democrats have voted with Republicans for twenty-five years, really since 1938… so that we have a very difficult time, on a controversial piece of legislation, securing a working majority.”
In November surviving Democrats collided with rejuvenated Republicans. Conservatives beat George Earle in Pennsylvania, Philip La Follette in Wisconsin, and Frank Murphy in Michigan.2 Among the new Republican faces were Robert A. Taft and John Bricker of Ohio, Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, and Thomas E. Dewey, who ran Governor Lehman of New York such a close race that he was already being spoken of as a presidential possibility in 1940. Although Democrats retained control of both congressional houses, liberal strength in the House had been cut in half (Lyndon Johnson made it, but Maverick didn’t). Overall, the GOP, which only two years earlier had seemed to be on its way to joining the extinct Whigs, had picked up a dozen governorships, eighty-two House seats, and eight new Senate seats. Republican incumbents had not lost a single race.
At his first post-election press conference the President was asked, “Will you not encounter coalition opposition?” FDR replied that he didn’t think so. The reporter said, “I do!” and his colleagues laughed. Cryptically the President commented, “The trees are too close to the forest.”
And so they were. The challenges to freedom’s leaders no longer lay within the United States; they were on the other side of the world’s two greatest oceans, in Germany and Japan. As early as Christmas 1935 Roosevelt had written Baruch, “I still worry about world affairs more than domestic problems which include the election.” Now, two elections later, his worries had multiplied. The country was still overwhelmingly isolationist; alerting it to the distant threats was a challenging task, so vast that it beggared description. But this much seemed certain: coalition politics on Capitol Hill would be irrelevant for some time. Even the hard-core Roosevelt haters would swing in line if the nation faced an outside enemy. Childs had conceded that; in 1936 he had written, “A major war would serve, of course, as it did for Wilson, to dissolve the fury,” and, in 1938, “One thing, and one thing alone, could bring about a shift in the attitude of the hating class, and that, of course, is a war…. It is no accident that those who rail most violently against the Roosevelt domestic policies speak with grudging approval of the President’s foreign policy.”
What made this phenomenon remarkable was that his critics were endorsing something which did not exist. At this time he still had no foreign policy. He needed one; he knew that. He had begun looking for it during his first administration, and the search, still unfulfilled, had been pressed in earnest since a December day, nearly eleven months before the 1938 off-year election, when the United States gunboat Panay, lying at anchor on the Yangtze River above Nanking, had been deliberately bombed and sunk by aircraft from the Empire of Japan.
SIX
A Shadow of Primitive Terror
Like another bright Sunday four years later, December 12, 1937, was a day of rest for the ships of the U.S. Navy. The officers and men of the U.S.S. Panay felt they deserved it. Although the 450-ton, shoal-draft gunboat had been designed merely to protect American shipping and American citizens from irresponsible guerrilla bands roaming the shores of the Yangtze, her crew had worked around the clock for the past two nights. Nanking was about to fall to the Japanese army. Chiang Kai-shek’s foreign office advised Americans in the city to leave. All that Saturday the gunboat had been taking aboard staff from the U.S. embassy, foreign correspondents, photographers, and American businessmen. Fully loaded, and with shellfire uncomfortably close, the Panay weighed anchor. Pursued by Japanese artillery, she sailed twenty-seven miles upstream and anchored in quieter waters beside three Standard Oil tankers. Afterward, American isolationists charged that the Panay was “convoying” the tankers and deserved her fate. But this was ridiculous. By treaty the Yangtze was an international waterway. It was spangled with the flags of all trading nations. Nobody was convoying anybody.
Indeed, the Panay’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander J. J. Hughes, had special reason to be tranquil. Twelve days earlier the American ambassador in Tokyo had informed the Japanese government of the gunboat’s position and its probable mission. Hughes was flying the Stars and Stripes prominently. Japanese officers storming Nanking knew precisely where he was—which, as it turned out, was unfortunate for him, his ship, and Standard Oil’s vessels. At 1:30 P.M. two flights of Mitsubishi warplanes with the rising sun on their wings dive-bombed and strafed the gunboat and the tankers until they all sank. Then, as lifeboats carried the survivors shoreward, they, too, were machine-gunned. Two American bluejackets and one civilian were killed; eleven sailors were gravely wounded. Ambassador Joseph C. Grew, remembering the Maine, expected the United States to declare war.
Nothing of the sort happened. In Washington Tokyo’s explanations and apologies were eagerly accepted. The State Department agreed that the attack had been a “mistake.” It wasn’t. A court of inquiry in Shanghai later brought out incontrovertible evidence that the sinking was ordered by responsible Japanese officers. The likeliest explanation was that it had been a test of American nerve. If so, the attackers had reason to be pleased. In Tokyo Grew was told that the Open Door policy was no longer applicable in China—although if the Chinese door was really shut, the biggest intruder was the Imperial Japanese Army. This inherent contradiction didn’t trouble the aggressors. They knew now that America was a paper tiger. Gallup had polled voters with an opinion about the Panay incident and found that 70 percent favored complete withdrawal of U.S citizens from the Far East, including clergymen and medical missions. “Apparently no American except Mr. Grew,” Samuel Eliot Morison wrote acidly, “remembered the Maine.”
Those who did might have pointed out that the Maine had blown up ninety-two miles from the continental United States; the Panay had sunk seven thousand miles away. In the 1930s distances meant more than in the Seventies. A courier couldn’t take off on the next international flight. There weren’t any. It would be another eighteen months before Pan American would inaugurate the first regular transatlantic passenger service. Even coast-to-coast flights still took a day and a night, and the China Clipper, flying mail only, flew from San Francisco to Manila in 59 hours 48 minutes.1 Most Americans who went abroad (they were few) sailed on ocean liners. A superb steamer took New Yorkers to Rome in ten days; Californians could reach Tokyo in fifteen days if the captain was deft and the weather right. Only when this enormity of prewar oceans is borne in mind does the isolationism of the Depression become comprehensible.
But there were other factors. To pacifists a repetition of the last war’s insensate horrors was unthinkable. America’s European allies of 1918 were despised as people who welshed on their debts. England was a special demon; only along the eastern seaboard and in the South coul
d anglophiles be found in great number. Inevitably antagonism toward the Old World found political expression. As Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. have pointed out, “Among oceans, the Pacific has always been the favorite of American isolationists: this is true for the simple reason that the Pacific is not the Atlantic…. Isolationism is opposed to the introduction of ‘European ideas’ in American politics; it has never had to oppose the introduction of ‘Asian ideas’ because scarcely anyone has tried to introduce them. Among the more virulent isolationists, indeed, one detects almost a hatred of Europe.” And, one might add, an even deeper hatred of those rich, overeducated Easterners who still doted on Europe.
In 1937 these feelings were compounded by ignorance. The Depression had obscured foreign affairs by turning the country inward. Americans simply hadn’t had time for the troubles of others. At each deepening of the international crisis, their attention had been diverted by developments at home. The following parallels are suggestive:
Hitler becomes dictator
March 1933
Roosevelt becomes President
Germany rearms
March 1935
Second Hundred Days
Italy invades Ethiopia
October 1935
Assassination of Huey Long
Germany reoccupies Rhineland
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 26
