The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Long immersed in the local undergrowth of American politics, Roosevelt was wholly familiar with the obstacles to party change. His refusal to break with some of the more unsavory local bosses like Hague and Kelly is clear evidence that he had no disposition to undertake the most obvious kind of reform. Perhaps, though, the President underestimated the possibility of party invigoration from the top.

  Some New Dealers, worried by the decay of the Democratic party as a bulwark for progressive government, wanted to build up “presidential” factions pledged to the New Deal, factions that could lift the party out of the ruck of local bickering and orient it toward its national program. Attempts to build such presidential factions were abortive. They might have succeeded, however, had the President given them direction and backing. The New Deal had stimulated vigorous new elements in the party that put programs before local patronage, that were chiefly concerned with national policies of reform and recovery. By joining hands with these elements, by exploiting his own popularity and his control over the national party machinery, the President could have challenged anti-New Deal factions and tried to convert neutralists into backers of the New Deal.

  Whether such an attempt would have succeeded cannot be answered because the attempt was never made. Paradoxically enough, however, the purge itself indicates that a long-run, well-organized effort might have worked in many states. For the purge did succeed under two conditions—in a Northern urban area, where there was some planning rather than total improvisation, and in those Southern states where the White House was helping a well-entrenched incumbent rather than trying to oust a well-entrenched opponent. The first was the case of O’Connor, the second the cases of Pepper and of Barkley. Indeed, the results of the purge charted a rough line between the area within the presidential reach and the area beyond it. Undoubtedly the former area would have been much bigger had Roosevelt systematically nourished New Deal strength within the party during his first term.

  But he did not. The reasons that the President ignored the potentialities of the great political organization he headed were manifold. He was something of a prisoner of the great concessions he had made to gain the 1932 nomination, including the admission of Garner and other conservatives to the inner circle. His first-term successes had made his method of personal leadership look workable; overcoming crisis after crisis through his limitless resourcefulness and magnetism, Roosevelt did not bother to organize the party for the long run. As a politician eager to win, Roosevelt was concerned with his own political and electoral standing at whatever expense to the party. It was much easier to exploit his own political skill than try to improve the rickety, sprawling party organization.

  The main reason, however, for Roosevelt’s failure to build up the party lay in his unwillingness to commit himself to the full implications of party leadership, in his eternal desire to keep open alternative tactical lines of action, including a line of retreat. The personal traits that made Roosevelt a brilliant tactician—his dexterity, his command of a variety of roles, his skill in attack and defense, above all his personal magnetism and charisma—were not the best traits for hard, long-range purposeful building of a strong popular movement behind a coherent political program. The latter would have demanded a continuing intellectual and political commitment to a set strategy—and this kind of commitment Roosevelt would not make.

  He never forgot the great lesson of Woodrow Wilson, who got too far ahead of his followers. Perhaps, though, he never appreciated enough Wilson’s injunction that “if the President leads the way, his party can hardly resist him.” If Roosevelt had led and organized the party toward well-drawn goals, if he had aroused and tied into the party the masses of farmers and workers and reliefers and white-collar workers and minority religious and racial groups, if he had met the massed power of group interests with an organized movement of his own, the story of the New Deal on the domestic front during the second term might have been quite different.

  Thus Roosevelt can be described as a great party leader only if the term is rigidly defined. On the one hand he tied the party, loosely perhaps, to a program; he brought it glorious victories; he helped point it in new ideological directions. On the other hand, he subordinated the party to his own political needs; he failed to exploit its full possibilities as a source of liberal thought and action; and he left the party, at least at its base, little stronger than when he became its leader.

  Yet in an assessment of his party leadership there is a final argument in Roosevelt’s defense. Even while the New Deal was running out domestically, new problems and new forces were coming into national and world focus. Whatever the weaknesses of his shiftiness and improvising, these same qualities gave him a flexibility of maneuver to meet new conditions. That flexibility was desperately needed as 1938 and 1939 brought crisis after crisis in world affairs.

  NINETEEN

  Diplomacy: Pinpricks and Protest

  DURING THE SWIRLING EVENTS of his second term, the President seemed to yearn even more for stability and fixity in his immediate surroundings. He still began his day around eight with breakfast in bed, a brief health checkup by his physician, Admiral Ross T. McIntyre, and a quick search through half a dozen newspapers—the New York Times and Herald Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and Washington Times-Herald—with special attention to the White House stories and the editorial page. While he was still in bed or dressing, his secretaries and perhaps a cabinet member or congressman would come in for a somewhat helter-skelter and jocular parley on matters due to come up during the day. Wheeled to his office around 10:30, the President would begin a series of short appointments that stretched through the lunch hour and into the afternoon. Then came dictation time; when the mail basket was especially high the President might return to it in the evening. He got through an immense correspondence by keeping his letters brief. “Two short sentences will generally answer any known letter,” he once instructed his son James.

  The President’s workrooms remained much the same through the years, except that his desk became increasingly cluttered by little figures, animals, lighters, flags, and the like. He seemed to look on these gadgets as old friends he hated to part with. The room that best reflected Roosevelt’s personality was not his office in the executive wing of the White House but his study in the Oval Room on the second floor—a comfortable room with dark green curtains and white walls and full of chintz-covered furniture, family mementos, piles of books, stamp albums, Currier & Ives prints. With its naval paintings and ship models—the latter on stands, in bottles, or propped up where space allowed—the room had a decided navy air. Yet it was the nostalgic air of Yankee clippers and heroic encounters of the past, not one that bespoke the feverish naval race, the mammoth battleships, dirty tankers, and submarine packs of a world preparing for war.

  Although he was now entering his late fifties, Roosevelt physically seemed to have changed little during his five or six years in the White House. At times his face seemed drawn and gray and then he seemed older, but such times usually followed the head colds that plagued him relentlessly in Washington. A few days of rest and sun at Warm Springs or on a cruise would erase the lines of care and fatigue, and his tanned face would look much as it had years before. The President had had no serious illness; in 1938 he suffered a fainting spell one evening at Hyde Park but he recovered almost immediately.

  There was a kind of fixity in Roosevelt’s immediate official circle too. In 1938 Early, McIntyre, Missy Le Hand, and Grace Tully were still in faithful attendance. James Roosevelt’s service as a secretary ended in mid-1938 when he went to the Mayo Clinic to be treated for gastric ulcers. The President’s military aide, Pa Watson, so won the hearts of Roosevelt and his secretaries that he stayed on as a member of the secretariat. The Reorganization Act of 1939 permitted the President to add six presidential assistants with the much-advertised “passion for anonymity,” but even so he filled these places slowly.

  Roosevelt’s relationship w
ith his staff preserved the dignity of his office and person while also permitting boisterous jokes and a light playfulness. He was forever deprecating Watson’s fishing and hunting exploits and laying election or other bets with Early or McIntyre. Shortly after the Munich crisis, from North Carolina where he had gone to rest because of lung lesions, McIntyre wrote Missy Le Hand a note that was a take-off on the kind of letters that flooded the White House. The President rose to the occasion:

  My dear Mr. McIntyre:

  I am often touched, but seldom have I been so touched as by your letter to Miss Le Hand. It was one of a very small number of letters which occasionally she shows to me. Both of us were dissolved in tears.

  Your one hundred per cent support in the mountains of North Carolina means more to me than carrying Vermont.

  I am glad that you and your good wife are church-going people. That will keep you both from drink and from evil ways.

  I hope that you and your family have not been seriously hurt by the Republican depression and that you are able to buy shoes and stockings for the children.

  You are such a fine citizen that if we have to go to war with Hitler I am sure you will be the first to enlist.

  Your Friend,

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Nor did foreign crisis bring any major change in the President’s working habits. He still conducted business in a flurry of telephone calls, personal conferences, formal correspondence cleared with appropriate agencies, informal letters cleared with no one, chits to secretaries and cabinet officers, evening conferences. Ordinarily Roosevelt worked closely with Hull, and the two men—the one flexible, fast-moving, resourceful; the other dogged, cautious, rigid—complemented each other nicely. But as usual, Roosevelt would not confine himself within administrative channels. He often communicated directly with the icy, hardheaded Welles, with the talented Berle, with a host of ambassadors and ministers, with the Pope, with old friends at home like Cox and Baruch, with countless other friends abroad. Knowing the distant ramifications of foreign policy, searching for ideas and expedients, he discussed the world situation with Ickes and Hopkins and Wallace as well as with the State Department men.

  The foreign policies that emerged from this welter were the product of no single person, although the President dominated the process. Indeed, they were more a simple response to events abroad than to a set plan or program of foreign policy making at home. Gossipy little notes from diplomats, long letters by clipper pouch, formal pronunciamentos by foreign leaders, urgent cables picked up by chattering instruments, decoded, mimeographed, and stamped “Secret and Confidential”—these brought the news of ceaselessly changing affairs abroad. Still lacking a firm strategy, Roosevelt and his policy makers struggled in the second half of his second term to divine the meaning of affairs and to fashion a role for the most powerful democracy on earth.

  The tangled strands of history allow for little neatness. There was never a sharp turning point when Roosevelt’s absorption with domestic matters left off and his concern for foreign affairs began. Despite the President’s later talk about shifting roles from “Dr. New Deal” to “Dr. Win the War,” the fitful rush of events would allow no simple shift. While Roosevelt was struggling with recession in March 1938, the Nazis overran Austria. While he was still trying to purge conservative Democrats later that year, Hitler thrust into the Sudetenland. While the President was jousting with a rebellious Congress early in 1939, Hitler swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia and turned his eyes in new directions.

  Despite the isolationist tendencies of the early New Deal, the President had never ignored the rest of the world. And now, midway through his second term, he would not allow the roar of events abroad to drown out his liberal projects at home. How to build a viable foreign policy and yet sustain the New Deal, all in a context of fast-moving events abroad and changing economic and political conditions at home—this was the central job in the latter part of his second term, and one that would challenge even Roosevelt’s political dexterity and resourcefulness.

  MUNICH: NO RISKS, NO COMMITMENTS

  A month after seizing Austria, Hitler appealed to his people for another four years of power to consolidate the gains of the new Gross-Deutschland. On April 11, 1938, it was announced that a gratifying 99 per cent of the people—including Austrians—approved. Once again the Fuehrer moved fast. Ten days later he ordered his generals to draw up new plans for aggression.

  Who could doubt where he would strike next? Czechoslovakia now lay like a blunt wedge driven into the heart of the new Germany. Czechoslovakia was both spawn and symbol of Versailles, a proud democracy, a buttress of the League of Nations, an ally of France and Russia, a small nation but well armed and supplied behind natural defenses, and a nation, in the Fuehrer’s eyes, of Slav subhumans. As usual Hitler brought to his strategy a superb combination of military, diplomatic, and psychological power.

  In Czechoslovakia the Fuehrer had an immensely useful tool for his ambitions—the minority of about three million Sudeten Germans who had long been demanding more autonomy from Prague. For several years he had been subsidizing the Nazi leader of the Sudetens, Konrad Henlein. While shouting to the world about righting the wrongs of an oppressed minority, Hitler instructed Henlein to “demand so much that we can never be satisfied.” At the same time, Hitler worked to complete Prague’s diplomatic isolation. He played on Polish and Rumanian fears of Moscow so that Russia would not be able to pass across those countries to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid in the event of invasion. He tempted Poland and Hungary with the prospect of slices of Czech territory. As for the Western powers, Hitler divined correctly the French fear of war and he stressed to the British the oppression of the Sudetens and the folly of a great conflict over their return to the Fatherland. To protect his own flank he paid a state visit to Rome and loudly proclaimed to Mussolini, who was still anxious over the Nazi absorption of Austria, that the frontier of the Alps would be “forever inviolable.”

  Only two forces could stop Hitler, and he overbore both of them. One was a group of generals who feared that Germany was not strong enough to wage a major war. Alternately pleading with the military and bullying them, the Fuehrer pushed aside the veteran commanders and insisted on his plan of conquest. The other potential obstacle was united opposition from Russia and the West. But the central strategic premise on which Hitler operated—“there is no solidarity in Europe,” as he put it—held true. Ironically, there was a brief moment when the two forces might have united. A small group of officers and civilian officials conspired to seize Hitler as soon as he ordered the attack on the Czechs. But their plan turned on the question whether Britain and France would come to Prague’s aid.

  Would they? The difference between Hitler and the Western leaders was crucial: In order to destroy Czechoslovakia the former was willing to risk a general war while Chamberlain and Daladier, to save Czechoslovakia, were not willing to risk such a war. Russia and the Western nations each feared being deserted by the other to face alone the rising German might.

  The United States, of course, still carried little weight in the quivering balance of power politics. It did little more than watch and worry. Despite his preoccupation with the continuing recession and a balky Congress during the spring of 1938, Roosevelt followed European developments with care. He received a great deal of information on the complex chess game in Europe—so much, indeed, and from such varied sources that his hopes alternately rose and fell.

  On the over-all course of affairs the President had fixed ideas. Looking on the Nazis and Fascists as gangsters who ultimately would have to be restrained, he had deep misgivings about Chamberlain’s appeasement policies. When he heard that the prime minister was ready to recognize Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia in return for a pact of friendship, the President said that if when a police chief made a deal with gangsters the result was no more holdups, the police chief would be a hero, but if the gangsters reneged the police chief would go to jail. Chamberla
in, he felt, was taking a very long chance.

  But these were private sentiments, not public action. Unwilling to throw his weight into the balance, the President was still confined to a policy of pinpricks and righteous protest. No risks, no commitments, was the motto of the White House. When he heard that a German battleship was to stop off in the West Indies, he ordered an American war vessel to be there at the same time. When Germany wanted helium from the United States for its dirigibles, the President for a time encouraged Ickes, who had control of its allotment, to stall them off. Meanwhile Hull specialized in protests. The Secretary of State repeatedly denounced international lawlessness and, when tension began to rise over Hitler’s posture toward Czechoslovakia, he solemnly called attention to the Kellogg antiwar pact signed a decade before. Men of power in Europe laughed off America’s moral protestations. Ciano, Italy’s cynical foreign minister, noted in his diary how he listened solemnly while a visiting American played the usual gramophone record and then turned on a record of his own.

  Only one commitment was the President willing to make. Speaking in mid-August at Queen’s University in Ontario, he assured the Canadians in words that Roosevelt himself had inserted in a State Department draft, that “the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other Empire.” But Czechoslovakia, not Canada, was next on the Nazi timetable.