American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  [FDR on NIRA at signing]: Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 246-47, quoted at p. 246.

  “Discipline and Direction Under Leadership”?

  [FDR at work]: Burns, Lion, pp. 264-65; Freidel, Launching, pp. 274-88; see also Milton Katz, “From Hoover to Roosevelt,” in Katie Loucheim, The Making of the New Deal: The Insiders Speak (Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 120-29, esp. pp. 121-22; Davis, New Deal Years, ch. 6.

  28 [Perkins on FDR]: Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (Viking, 1946), p. 163.

  [Berle on FDR]: Berle and Jacobs, p. 72.

  [“Combine eating up grain”]: quoted in Bernard Asbell, The F.D.R. Memoirs (Doubleday, 1973), p. 84.

  [Brain trust]: see sources cited in ch. 1, first section, supra.

  [Frankfurter and FDR]: see Max Freedman, annot., Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1928-1945 (Little, Brown, 1967), esp. chs. 2-4; Bruce A. Murphy, The Brandeis/ Frankfurter Connection (Oxford University Press, 1982), ch. 4.

  29 [Eleanor Roosevelt as First Lady]: Lash, ch. 35; Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember, chs. 7-9; see also Burns, Lion, p. 173.

  [Beard on Eleanor]: quoted in Lash, p. 373.

  [Dewson on both Roosevelts]: Molly Dewson Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.

  [FDR’s accessibility]: see Freidel, Launching, pp. 74-79; Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 32.

  [FDR as quarterback]: Burns, Lion, p. 171.

  30 [FDR as broker]: see Otis L. Graham, Jr., Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon (Oxford University Press, 1976), ch. 1; Graham, “The Broker State,” Wilson Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 5 (Winter 1984), pp. 86-97.

  [“To cement our society”]: address at Green Bay, Wise, August 9, 1934, in Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 3, pp. 370-75, quoted at p. 375; see also Moley, Seven Years, p. 290. The Nebraska congressman was Edward Burke.

  [“The outward expression”]: October 24, 1934, in Public Papers, vol. 3, pp. 435-40, quoted at p. 436.

  [Congress and the early New Deal]: James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (University of Kentucky Press, 1967), ch. 1, FDR quoted on Byrd at pp. 29-30; Burns, Lion, pp. 174-75; Shover, “Populism in the Nineteen-Thirties”; Koeniger; Barbara Sinclair, “Party Realignment and the Transformation of the Political Agenda: House of Representatives, 1925-1938,” American Political Science Review, vol. 71, no. 3 (September 1977), pp. 940-53.

  [“Robbing Peter to pay Paul”]: Green Bay address, in Public Papers, vol. 3, p. 374.

  30-1 [Economic conditions, spring-summer 1933]: Irving Bernstein, A Caring Society: The New Deal Confronts the Great Depression (Houghton Mifflin, 1985), pp. 92-93, also pp. 35-36.

  31 [“Burned down the capitol”]: quoted in Robert Bendiner, Just Around the Corner (Harper, 1967), p. 35.

  [Praise from Tribune and American]: see ibid., p. 36.

  [Lord Roosevelt and King George]: James E. Sargent, Roosevelt and the Hundred Days: Struggle for the Early New Deal (Garland Publishing, 1981), p. 214; Personal Letters, vol. 3, pp. 369-71; Freidel, Launching, pp. 278-79.

  [Families on relief]: Bernstein, Caring Society, pp. 32, 34.

  [“ I want to talk”]: March 12, 1933, in Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 61-65, quoted at p. 61.

  [Perkins on FDR’s radio delivery]: Perkins, p. 72.

  [FDR’s press conferences]: see Graham J. White, FDR and the Press (University of Chicago Press, 1979), ch. 1; see also Public Papers, vols. 2 and 3 passim.

  [Hugh Johnson and the Blue Eagle in action]: Johnson, chs. 19-28; Matthew Josephson, “The General,” New Yorker, vol. 10 (August 18-September 1, 1934); Leverett S. Lyon et al., The National Recovery Administration: An Analysis and Appraisal (Brookings Institution, 1935), part 2; Donald R. Richberg, The Rainbow (Doubleday, Doran, 1936), chs. 10-11; Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 7; New York Times, September 14, 1933, pp. 1-3.

  [Ford and NRA Code]: Nevins and Hill, pp. 15-27.

  [Nye on NRA]: Schlesinger, Coming, p. 131.

  [Tugwell on Consumers’ Advisory Board]: quoted in ibid., p. 130.

  [Section 7(a)]: Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), chs. 1-3, text of 7(a) quoted at p. 34; Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 9; Twentieth Century Fund, Labor and the Government (McGraw-Hill, 1935).

  33 [Lewis on 7(a)]: Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis (Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977), p. 184.

  [“PRESIDENT WANTS YOU”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 216.

  [“Forget about injunctions”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Coming, p. 139.

  [“National Run Around”]: Burns, Lion, p. 193.

  [Failure and significance of NRA]: Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal,” Political Science Qarterly, vol. 97, no. 2 (Summer 1982), pp. 255-78; Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 10; Hawley, chs. 6-7; Berle and Jacobs, p. 102; McQuaid, pp. 355-56; Johnson, chs. 29-30; Bernard Bellush, The Failure of the NRA (Norton, 1975), esp. chs. 7-8,

  [FDR’s private judgment on NRA]: see Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America 1929-1941 (Times Books, 1984), p. 162.

  34 [PWA]: Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 17; Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes (Simon and Schuster, 1953-54), vol. 1, passim.

  [FERA and CWA]: Bernstein, Caring Society, pp. 25-42; George McJimsey, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (Harvard University Press, 1987), ch. 4; Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 16; Burns, Lion, p. 196; Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (Harper, 1948), ch. 3; William M. Bremer, “Along the ‘American Way’: The New Deal’s Work Relief Programs for the Unemployed,” Journal of American History, vol. 62, no. 3 (December 1975), pp. 636-52; Paul E. Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Louisiana State University Press, 1978), chs. 3-4; Davis, New Deal Years, pp. 305-14.

  35 [Sargent on FDR]: Sargent, pp. 21-22.

  [“Get somewhere”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 197.

  [London Conference]: Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 39-58; Feis, chs. 12-20; Burns, Lion, pp. 177-78; Schlesinger, Coming, chs. 12-13; James R. Moore, “Sources of New Deal Economic Policy: The International Dimension,” Journal of American History, vol. 61, no. 3 (December 1974), pp. 728-44; Freidel, Launching, chs. 27-28; Betty Glad, Key Pittman: The Tragedy of a Senate Insider (Columbia University Press, 1986), ch. 17; Davis, New Deal Years, ch. 5.

  36 [Tariff bill]: Schlesinger, Coming, pp. 253-55.

  [Gold purchases]: ibid., ch. 14; Elmus Wicker, “Roosevelt’s 1933 Monetary Experiment,” Journal of American History, vol. 57, no. 4 (March 1971), pp. 864-79; John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Crisis, 1928-1938 (Houghton Mifflin, 1959), pp. 6l-75.

  [“A lucky number”]: quoted in Blum, p. 70.

  [Recognition of the Soviet Union]: Dallek, pp. 78-81; Robert P. Browder, The Origins of Soviet-American Diplomacy (Princeton University Press, 1953), esp. chs. 4-6; George F. Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1961), pp. 297-300; Loy W. Henderson, A Question of Trust: The Origins of U.S.-Soviet Diplomatic Relations, George W. Baer, ed. (Hoover Institution Press, 1986).

  36-7 [“Whited out” map]: Lash, p. 589.

  37 [Berle on public works and NRA]: Berle and Jacobs, p. 102.

  [Ickes and the oil industry]: Linda J. Lear, “Harold L. Ickes and the Oil Crisis of the First Hundred Days,” Mid-America, vol. 63, no. 1 (January 1981), pp. 3-13; Ickes Diary, vol. 1, pp. 10-16, 36-47 passim.

  [FSRC]: C. Roger Lambert, “Want and Plenty: The Federal Surplus Relief Corporation and the AAA,” Agricultural History, vol. 46, no. 3 (July 1972), pp. 390-400; Irvin May, Jr., “Cotton and Cattle: The FSRC and Emergency Work Relief,” ibid., pp. 401-13.

  [Air mail]: Schlesinger, Coming, pp. 448-55; Thomas T. Spencer, “The Air Mail Controversy of 1934,” Mid-America, vol. 62, no. 3 (October 1980), pp. 161-72.

  [1934 e
lection]: Schlesinger, Coming, pp. 503-7; Burns, Lion, pp. 198-203.

  [“Are you better off?”]: June 28, 1934, in Public Papers, vol. 3, pp. 312-18, quoted at p. 314.

  [Garner on congressional majority]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 202.

  37-8 [Churchill on FDR]: Churchill, “While theWorld Watches,” Collier’s, December 29, 1934, as quoted in Schlesinger, Coming, p. 23.

  2. The Arc of Conflict

  39 [“We sold everything we could”]: Jimmy Douglas, quoted in Federal Writers’ Project, These Are Our Lives (University of North Carolina Press, 1939; reprinted by Arno Press, 1969), p. 241.

  [NRA in Macon County]: Arthur F. Raper, Preface to Peasantry: A Tale of Two Black Belt Counties (University of North Carolina Press, 1936), p. 237.

  [“Your best tie”]: Personal reminiscence of the author.

  [Writer on currant pickers]: John Macnamara, “Berry Picker,” Nation, vol. 139, no. 3610 (September 12, 1934), pp. 302-4, quoted at p. 303.

  [Du Pont vice president on cook]: Robert Carpenter, quoted in Gerard Colby Zilg, Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 289.

  [Indiana housewife on relief]: quoted in Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middle-town in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (Harcourt, 1937), pp. 111-12.

  40 [“God damn all Roosevelts.”]: quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 567.

  [Garden City dust storm]: quoted in Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 17.

  [“Eleven Cent cotton”]: quoted in Ann M. Campbell, “Reports from Weedpatch, California: The Records of the Farm Security Administration,” Agricultural History, vol. 48, no. 3 (July 1974), p. 402.

  [Economic conditions, 1929-35]: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), part 1, p. 135 (Series D 85-86) (unemployment); part 1, p. 170 (Series D 802-10) (weekly earnings); part 2, p. 610 (Series N 1-29) (construction).

  Class War in America

  41 [“A nice old gentleman”]: address delivered at Syracuse, N.Y., September 29, 1936, in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 5, pp. 383-90, quoted at p. 385.

  [FDR’s conservatism in early New Deal]: see Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Launching of the New Deal (Little, Brown, 1973), chs. 12-14 passim.

  42 [Values of American right]: see Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (Knopf, 1955), esp. ch. 4.

  [Al Smith and the New Deal]: Richard O’Connor, The First Hurrah: A Biography of Alfred E. Smith (Putnam, 1970), chs. 18-19; Oscar Handlin, Al Smith and His America (Little, Brown, 1958), ch. 8.

  42-3 [Founding of Liberty League]: George Wolfskill, The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934-1940 (Greenwood Press, 1962), pp. 23-25, 56-67; Frederick Rudolph, “The American Liberty League, 1934-1940,” American Historical Review, vol. 56, no. 1 (October 1950), pp. 19-33; Zilg, pp. 283-98; Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (Harper, 1970), pp. 200-2.

  43 [Shouse-FDR meeting]: Wolfskill, pp. 27-28, quoted at p. 27.

  [FDR on “Commandments”]: press conference 137, August 24, 1934, as quoted in James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, 1956), pp. 206-8, and Schlesinger, Coming, p. 487.

  [Conservative attack on New Deal]: George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson, All but the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933-39 (Macmillan, 1969), pp. 161-62; collection of American Liberty League pamphlets at Sawyer Library, Williams College.

  43-4 [FDR’s threat to capitalists’ self-esteem]: see Burns, Lion, p. 240; Daniel Aaron, “Conservatism, Old and New,” American Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer 1954), pp. 99-110; Louis Hartz, “The Whig Tradition in America and Europe,” American Political Science Review, vol. 46, no. 4 (December 1952), pp. 989-1002; Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (Henry Regnery, 1955); Rossiter, ch. 11; Robert A. Nisbet, “Conservatism and Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 58, no. 2 (September 1952), pp. 167-75; Richard W. Leopold, Elihu Root and the Conservative Tradition (Little, Brown, 1954); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Harcourt, 1955); Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited (Scribner, 1949).

  44 [French observer on wealth and virtue]: Burns, Lion, p. 240.

  [FDR on classmate’s remarks]: quoted in ibid., p. 205.

  [FDR on “dinner-party conversations”]: ibid., pp. 205-6.

  [Hofstadter on betrayal]: Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (Knopf, 1948), p. 330; see also Wolfskill and Hudson, ch. 6.

  [Names for FDR]: Wolfskill and Hudson, pp. 16-17.

  [“The $64 question”]: ibid., p. 25.

  45 [“THE PRESIDENT’S WIFE IS SUING”]: ibid.

  [Obsession with FDR’s disability]: ibid., pp. 12-15.

  [FDR’s “insanity”]: ibid., pp. 5-11.

  [Anti-Semitism]: ibid., pp. 65-78.

  45-6 [AFL in 1920s and depression]: Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 83-108; see also Eugene T. Sweeney, “The A.F.L.’s Good Citizen, 1920-1940,” Labor History, vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring 1972), pp. 200-16.

  46 [Union growth under 7(a)]: Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), chs. 2-3.

  [San Francisco labor conflict]: ibid., pp. 252-98; Felix Riesenberg. Jr., Golden Gate (Knopf, 1940), ch. 23; Charles P. Larrowe, “The Great Maritime Strike of ’34,” Labor History, vol. 11, no. 4 (Fall 1970), pp. 403-51, and vol. 12, no. 1 (Winter 1971), pp. 3-37.

  [Shape-up]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 254-56.

  47 [FDR on strike]: quoted in ibid., p. 289.

  [Perkins’s role in settlement]: ibid, pp. 288-90; George Martin, Madam Secretary (Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 313-22; Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (Viking, 1946), pp. 312-15.

  [Minneapolis strike]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 229-52; George H. Mayer, The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson (University of Minnesota Press, 1950), ch. 10.

  48 [Textile strike]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 298-315.

  [Brooks on textile strike]: quoted in ibid., p. 309.

  [Daniels on troops]: quoted in Schlesinger, Coming, p. 394.

  49 [“Destroying cities”]: quoted in Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 313.

  [Sharecroppers’ plight]: Erskine Caldwell, Tenant Farmer (Phoenix Press, 1935), quoted at p. 4; Raper.

  [Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union]: H. L. Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in This Land (Allanheld, Osmun, 1979), esp. chs. 4-10; Lowell Dyson, “Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and Depression Politics,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 2 (June 1973), pp. 230-52; Bernard K. Johnpoll, Pacifist’s Progress: Norman Thomas and the Decline of American Socialism (Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 146-52; Donald H. Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal (University of North Carolina Press, 1971); Jess Gilbert and Steve Brown, “Alternative Land Reform Proposals in the 1930s: The Nashville Agrarians and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union,” Agricultural History, vol. 55, no. 4 (October 1981), pp. 351-69.

  [Preacher on “this fuss”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Coming, p. 377.

  [Itinerant farm workers]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 150-70; see also Walter J. Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Greenwood Press, 1973), esp. ch. 8.

  50 [Bernstein on Imperial Valley dispute]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 160.

  [ACLU tour]: ibid., pp. 166-67.

  51 [“Prayer of Bitter Men”]: quoted in Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley, eds., One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression (University of Illinois Press, 1981), p. 365.

  “Lenin or Christ”—or a Path Between?

  52 [“Fight by all available means”]: “St
atutes of the Communist International Adopted at the Second Comintern Congress,” August 4, 1920, in Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919-1943, Documents (Oxford University Press, 1956), vol. 1, quoted at p. 163.

  [Sixth World Congress on smashing capitalism]: see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 189.

  [Communist party, eve of 1930s]: Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (Basic Books, 1984), ch. 1, esp. p. 5.

  [Depression as potential boon to Communists]: see Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919-1957) (Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 188-97.

  [Communist party membership, 1932-33]: Klehr, pp. 91-92.

  53 [“United front from below”]: ibid., pp. 13, 97-104; Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 197-98.

  [Browder]: Klehr, pp. 21-23; John McCarten, “Party Linesman,” New Yorker, vol. 14 (September 24, 1938), pp. 20-24, and (October 1, 1938), pp. 22-27; James Gilbert Ryan, “The Making of a Native Marxist: The Early Career of Earl Browder,” Review of Politics, vol. 39, no. 3 (July 1977), pp. 332-62.

  [Browder’s claims as to size of following]: Schlesinger, Upheaval, p. 198, [Signed-up members]: Klehr, p. 365.

  [League Against War and Fascism]: ibid., pp. 107-12; Howe and Coser, pp. 348-55.

  [Youth Congress]: Klehr, pp. 319-23; Earl Browder, “The American Communist Party in the Thirties,” in Rita James Simon, ed., As We Saw the Thirties (University of Illinois Press, 1967), pp. 227-29.

  [Writers and Communist party]: see Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (Harcourt, 1961), part 2 passim.

  [Demise of “red unions”]: Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (Princeton University Press, 1977), ch. 3, esp. pp. 74-75; Jack Statchel quoted on working among AFL workers at p. 74; Klehr, chs. 7, 13; Howe and Coser, ch. 6.

  [Thomas]: Johnpoll; W. A. Swanberg, Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist (Scribner, 1976).