Finletter agreed to the idea—something between a brain trust and a think tank—and approached Stevenson, who replied positively. “I shall be coming East, probably around the end of the month,” Stevenson told him. “I will be in New York then and could we have an evening perhaps with some others, for skull practice?” In advance of that meeting, Schlesinger sent Stevenson a bundle of study papers, which produced a grateful if somewhat amused, perhaps even bemused, response. “So many thanks for your letter . . . and the fat enclosures,” he wrote. “Lord knows when I will have time to read them, but read them I will. . . . I find concentration terribly difficult, what with distractions, weariness and chronic intellectual confusion.”5
Stevenson’s reluctance—his perennial difficulty in committing firmly to anything—would become a consistent feature of what became known as the Finletter Group. “The Gov. did not attend,” Finletter recalled wearily. “We couldn’t get him to the meetings. . . . I only remember he attended two meetings—one at Galbraith’s and one in Chicago.” The diplomat George Ball complained, “We could never get Adlai to do his homework.” Yet the study group would, in the words of the Stevenson speechwriter turned biographer, John Bartlow Martin, become “one of the most important, influential, and notable movements of modern American politics . . . [and] the basis of the New Frontier and the Great Society” under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.6
Stevenson provided a symbolic focal point for the Finletter Group, but the quality of the ideas stemmed from the distinction of its people. As well as Schlesinger, Ball, and Galbraith, regular participants included the CIA’s Richard Bissell, Truman’s Director of Policy Planning for the State Department Paul Nitze, Henry Wallace aide Paul Appleby, and diplomat Chester Bowles. Averell Harriman also attended the first meeting and was a frequent visitor thereafter. They met regularly in New York and Cambridge to discuss and revise papers. “I never worked with more intelligent and devoted people in all my born days,” Finletter recalled admiringly. “We just made ourselves a place where the best views of the Democratic Party were assembled. The quality of the discussion was the important thing. We spent hours together. These were men with first-class brains.” If there had been a deficit of ideas and new thinking during the 1952 Stevenson campaign, Schlesinger and Galbraith were doing their best to give the Democrats a fighting chance in 1956 by laying the groundwork for a new vision of modern liberalism.
Eisenhower committed his administration to what he called “the middle way”—the basis both of his political program and his leadership style. The new president believed that increased prosperity and the effects of industrialization, mass production and distribution, and urban growth contained within them the dangers of extreme class conflict (something Schlesinger had described in The Crisis of the Old Order). Eisenhower wanted to arrest the momentum of New Deal liberalism or, as Herbert Hoover—antihero of The Crisis of the Old Order—advised him, to achieve a “flattening of the curve of this particular trend.” But the president also wanted to find a way to ease the tensions arising from the modern state and to steer a reasonable course between capital and labor, the hard Right and the hard Left. The answer, he declared in the 1953 State of the Union Address, “[is] a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands for the welfare of the whole nation.”7
Schlesinger’s response to the challenge of the “middle way” would be an idea summed up in his phrase “the quality of American life.” It was a notion that would be used by Stevenson in 1956, and subsequently by Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Even a Republican president, Richard Nixon, would borrow the concept. Liberals, Schlesinger argued, needed to move not away from but beyond the basic goals of the New Deal. In an age of affluence, he argued, the state had to ensure that all Americans enjoyed at least a minimum quality of material comfort. “Instead of the quantitative liberalism of the 1930s rightly dedicated to the struggle to secure the economic basis of life,” he wrote, “we need now a ‘qualitative liberalism’ dedicated to bettering the quality of people’s lives and opportunities.” America was richer than it had ever been in its history, yet so many citizens remained excluded. “Our gross national product rises; our shops overflow with gadgets and gimmicks; consumer goods of ever-increasing ingenuity and luxuriance pour out of our ears,” he would explain in a 1956 essay on the future of liberalism. “But our schools become more crowded and dilapidated, our teachers more weary and underpaid, our playgrounds more crowded, our cities dirtier, our roads more teeming and filthy, our national parks more unkempt, our law enforcement more overworked and inadequate.” It was a theme that John Kenneth Galbraith would take up in his best-selling 1958 book, The Affluent Society, which pointed to the uneven experience of the American Dream. “Is this, indeed, the American genius?” he mordantly asked. Galbraith’s putting the question was a tribute to the power and importance of friendship in the development of ideas—one of the most important statements in American thinking, honed over the garden fence in Cambridge.8
After the 1952 election, in the privacy of his diary, Schlesinger had admitted to a “jaundiced picture of Stevenson.” Part of the problem, he had reflected, was that “one tends to overestimate Stevenson’s articulateness.” Yet in the immediate aftermath of defeat, he had already begun to think that “on a number of things he was right and I was wrong,” not least that “Adlai was right” in saying that they should not run as if it were still the Great Depression. Eisenhower had imbued a sense of what unprecedented postwar prosperity might offer for the middle class. The hard-won achievements of the New Deal, it seemed, meant “very little to younger people, for whom Social Security and collective bargaining and economic opportunity were as secure and unalterable parts of the landscape as the trees and bushes.” The Finletter Group was a response to that analysis, pushing Schlesinger to come up with new ideas such as “the quality of American life” that would push the party beyond the 1930s New Deal and the governor in a more liberal direction.9
But Schlesinger’s response to defeat was not only political; it was also historical. Going in to see Harry Truman a few weeks before the thirty-third president left the White House, Schlesinger had found him chipper and confident that “history would vindicate him and his administration.” Yet something else also struck Schlesinger. “I noticed,” he recorded thoughtfully, “that he still speaks of FDR as ‘the President.’ ”10
Truman understood who “the President” was, but young people, it seemed, did not. Reminding them became Arthur’s next major intellectual project.
Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson had been a bold and ambitious project, one that he had delivered with a combination of stylistic panache, depth of research, and a fresh interpretation. The idea for The Age of Roosevelt was on an even more grandiose, almost foolhardy, scale. Schlesinger toyed with the format at various stages, but by the time he started in the summer of 1953, the project had turned into a gargantuan five-volume history of the Roosevelt era. As with The Age of Jackson, the key theme running throughout would be the war between liberalism and business-dominated conservatism. Volume one, The Reign of Business, 1920–1933, would tell the story of the “stupidity and wickedness of business” and “the triumph of business values” in the 1920s, soon followed by a “collapse of faith in business” during the Wall Street Crash, which led to the election of FDR. Running alongside that story was one about the failure of liberals and intellectuals in the 1920s, including “indifference to democracy verging on anti-democracy: Babbitt [from the 1922 novel by Sinclair Lewis], H. L. Mencken,” as well as the “impotence of protest before prosperity” and the “essential conservatism” of the Democratic Party under Al Smith. Only with the emergence of “the happy warrior” FDR, supported by a new wave of intellectuals—the “brain trust (Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, Adolf Berle, Samuel Rosenman, Felix Frankfurter)”—did the necessary “radicalization” of ideas take place that allowed the Democrats to win “the campaign for America” in 1932.11
&n
bsp; The second volume, The First New Deal, 1933–1935, was set to show the power of Roosevelt’s bold thinking and action in the face of a national emergency. Here was a story of “American revival,” an audacious “experiment in national planning,” and the “creation of the labor movement.” Volume III, The House Divides, 1935–1937, would show business interests, led by the Liberty League, fighting back, “mounting Roosevelt hatred” and “proto-fascism,” coupled with a new threat, “communist penetration: influence among intellectuals.” Throughout all this tumult “FDR as administrator and leader, holding all together” and winning reelection in 1936. The fourth volume would examine The Crisis of the New Deal, 1937–1940, before the series ended with The New Deal Abroad looking at FDR’s wartime administration. Given that these last two volumes would never be written, the detail and argument in the outline for both was already more flat and less detailed than in the previous volumes, suggesting either that Schlesinger had run out of ideas even before he’d started or that he was uncomfortable with these more contested areas of FDR’s legacy from the outset. He would collapse those two volumes into a single volume (albeit one that he never completed). Of the overall purpose of the series, however, Schlesinger was confident: “Relation of New Deal to American liberal traditions—how New Deal changed conceptions of democracy (the ‘mixed economy’ and the recoil from totalitarianism)—how New Deal changed conceptions of foreign policy (relationship between force and freedom).”12
The epigraph to open The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1931, the first of three volumes in The Age of Roosevelt, would come from Emerson: “Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.” Reviewing the book in the New York Times, when it was eventually published, Henry Steele Commager would get the political point immediately. “In the bright sunshine of prosperity we have tended to forget, many of us, how black the [Depression] was,” he wrote. “It is one of the merits of Mr. Schlesinger’s book that it re-creates for us so vividly this tragic chapter of our history.”13
Schlesinger was well aware of the stakes involved in such an ambitious project, and, uncharacteristically, was nervous about his ability to deliver. “This is the first piece of serious writing that I have done for a long time, and I had forgotten what it was like,” he wrote to Marietta. “For years I simply sat down and dashed things off in the expectation that they would meet the day’s need and afterward could be forgotten. But this is different; and I had forgotten the tension of this kind of writing. It is terribly exciting, when things click, and dismal when they don’t, . . . and exhausting all the time.” His aim was to attack the first volume during the academic year 1953–1954 in order to have a draft ready well in advance of his publication date of spring 1956—an election year. “I fear that I will not make the deadline,” he wrote with a kind of cheerful pessimism, “but it is a tremendous relief to be at last under way.” The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933: The Age of Roosevelt, vol. I, would, in fact, be published late, in March 1957—too late to help Adlai Stevenson.14
Schlesinger had understood the dangers of political distractions, but the temptations had been too great. When Joseph Rauh and James Loeb approached him in the summer of 1953 about the possibility of taking a leadership role in Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), he turned them down flat, saying that he had to work on The Age of Roosevelt with “as little distraction as possible.” Yes, there were good financial reasons for needing to get the book written—“Years of living beyond our income have put the Schlesinger family in a tough condition, which can be remedied only by a bestselling book (and soon).” Nevertheless, Schlesinger also believed that “the book, if it is any good, will serve the liberal cause far better” than any hands-on political job. By 1955 he had changed his mind. The FDR book, Arthur reassured Stevenson’s wealthy friend and personal assistant William M. Blair Jr. when he came calling, “does not mean that I am proposing to retire from political life.”15
Stevenson, in truth, had been running for president again almost as soon as he lost the 1952 election, most notably making a world tour in 1953 to establish himself as an international statesman. Yet Adlai being Adlai, there was inevitably a great deal of disingenuous vacillation about whether he really wanted to run. When Schlesinger traveled to Springfield in the fall of 1954 to discuss the next election cycle, he was not surprised to hear the (non)candidate say, “He definitely will not enter primaries. If he is drafted, he will accept; but realistically he concedes that he will not be drafted twice.” The governor, Schlesinger thought, was “as warm and easy as ever,” but his prevarication was baffling. Even Stevenson himself conceded, “My present position is morally repugnant, emotionally unbearable and intellectually inconsistent.”16
Schlesinger returned to his theme over the coming months, putting Stevenson on the spot about whether he had the ambition to run for president. “I am really convinced that the one important doubt the American people have about you is whether you want to be President,” he admonished. “(Don’t say, ‘They are right!’) The people regard this as the highest honor they have in their power to bestow; and they do not want to have to force it on people, or to coax them to accept it, or to see them indecisive and Hamletish in the face of it.” The dangers of that latter approach were all too apparent. “I think that if the image you present to the electorate in the spring and summer of 1956 is one of reluctance and hesitation, you may win the nomination by default but will lose the election,” he went on. “But I think that, if the image you present is one of clarity, vigor and decision, you will have an excellent chance of beating Eisenhower.”17
Stevenson’s indecision was something that vexed his friends as much as it helped his opponents. “An enormously insecure man,” his son, Borden, said of his father. Agnes Meyer, wife of Washington Post owner Eugene Meyer and a personal friend of Stevenson, judged that he had “a deep psychopathic fear of [his] own greatness and destiny.” But events now began to help those who wanted Stevenson to commit to the idea of running properly for the nomination rather than hoping it would fall into his lap. First, in the fall of 1954, the Democrats had put in an unexpectedly strong performance in the midterm elections, with the party regaining control of the House and the Senate, and overturning a 30–18 Republican advantage in state governorships to hold a 27–21 Democratic edge. During the campaign, Stevenson had worked hard in close races around the country, making eighty-eight speeches in thirty-three states. “Toward the end,” said Elks Club Group alum John Bartlow Martin, “he was covering thousands of miles by air, touring the countryside in an open car, speaking several times a day, sidestepping local factional feuds, receiving delegations in hotel rooms till late at night, then working on a speech, then arising early to begin the next day’s labors.” These were not the actions of a man who had given up on politics—or ambition. The midterm results, and Stevenson’s role in the campaign, changed political calculations and, as Schlesinger told Stevenson, meant that the Democrats had at least “a reasonable chance of winning” in 1956.18
The real problem, however, was that Stevenson would be running against Dwight Eisenhower, one of the most popular presidents—and Americans—of the modern era. During 1955, Eisenhower’s approval rating in the Gallup poll ranged between 68 and 79 percent. For his opponents, it made no difference if that popularity was “rooted in the fact that he is the agent of the acceptance by Republicanism of the major policies of the Rooseveltian Revolution of the past two decades,” as Schlesinger’s friend, Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote in a 1955 essay, “Why Ike is Popular.” For Schlesinger, that popularity could not be ignored. “The following assumptions must be made with regard to 1956,” Schlesinger wrote to Joseph Rauh in September 1955. “That Eisenhower will run . . . [and] given the continuation of peace and prosperity, nothing will have happened to shatter Eisenhower’s popularity and the national mood of complacency and apathy on which his popularity rests and which his personality so well satisfies.” A long memo followed, with a comprehensive political analysis
and suggestions for a campaign playbook, ending with the upbeat point that the “one great advantage we enjoy over 1952 is that we can begin preparations fourteen months ahead of the election instead of 3 months,” a benefit that it was “essential not to squander.” Nevertheless, the fundamental assumption remained that they would be running against a formidable and popular candidate in an era of peace and prosperity. Anything that changed that calculation, Schlesinger wrote on September 6, “must be regarded as a windfall.”19
What fell into their lap came via personal calamity when two weeks later, on September 24, President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack after playing twenty-seven holes of golf in Denver, Colorado. Even when out of immediate danger, writes Nicholas Fortuin in the New England Journal of Medicine, Eisenhower’s prospect of “recovery was made more difficult, because the prevailing attitudes about patients with coronary artery disease among doctors and the public in the 1950s were uniformly pessimistic; at that time there were no effective palliative treatments, such as surgery or angioplasty, or drugs to improve survival, and ideas about preventive measures were in their infancy. Many patients were consigned to invalidism, and the prognosis for long life was thought to be bleak.”20
Financial markets went into free fall following Eisenhower’s heart attack, and so did the Republican Party. Vice President Richard Nixon recalled that Eisenhower himself went through a long period of deep depression. “He talked like a man who felt his public career was finished,” Nixon said. “He did not even want to discuss the possibility of running the following year.” When reporters asked Republican national chairman Len Hall about the election, his stock reply was that the ticket would be Ike and Dick. “Finally,” Nixon wrote, “one reporter asked the dreaded question: ‘What happens if Eisenhower decides not to run?’ Hall blurted out, ‘We will jump off that bridge when we come to it.’ ”21
Schlesinger Page 20
