Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  Schlesinger arrived back in Massachusetts at the end of February 1959 apparently energized by his visit to London, for he immediately got to work on the massive third volume of The Age of Roosevelt, which was published the following year. Any ideas about FDR’s foreign policy were themselves “mummified,” as he focused a further 750 pages on the domestic history of the Roosevelt administration, now taking the story through the presidential election of 1936.34

  The second volume had left off with Roosevelt’s triumph when the Democrats swept all before them in the midterm elections of 1934. Yet volume III opens in more uncertain times, as “thoughtful New Dealers knew that all was not so well as it looked.” Certainly there had been “no doubt impressive” accomplishments. The “downward grind” of 1933 had been stopped. But in the Manichean world of Schlesinger’s Age of Roosevelt, “by transforming the national mood from apathy to action, the New Deal was invigorating its enemies as well as its friends.” And for once the president seemed unsure of himself and how to act. “People tire of seeing the same name day after day in the important headlines of the papers, and the same voice night after night over the radio,” FDR wearily told a friend. To fill the vacuum, Schlesinger wrote, “clamorous new voices, like those of Huey Long and Father Coughlin, were seizing the headlines . . . [in the absence] of a lead of any sort from the White House.”35

  In part, Schlesinger put this sudden collapse of the national sense of well-being down to the effects of trauma. “In the half dozen years before 1935, the American people had been through two profound shocks,” he writes. “The first was the shock of the depression, bringing the sudden fear that the national economy could no longer assure its citizens jobs or perhaps even food and shelter.” The second was the shock of the New Deal itself. That second shock “terminated the national descent into listlessness” and initiated a new period of aspirational energy. “But soon,” Schlesinger added darkly, “it began to spread through the country and shoot off in several different directions.” In short, “the people . . . regained the energy to fight among themselves.”36

  To explain the effects of this phenomenon and how Roosevelt overcame its consequences, Schlesinger continued the religious theme he had developed so strongly in the first and second volumes. The entire first section of the book expounded on “The Theology of Ferment” and featured “crusades” and “The Messiah of the Rednecks,” namely Huey Long Jr., the populist senator from Louisiana. Long he viewed as a man “who gave off a sense of destiny,” but “as a technique of political self-aggrandizement, not as a gospel of social reconstruction.” This alternative to Roosevelt was “part traveling salesman, part confidence man, part gang leader, [with] at most a crude will toward personal power. He may not have been a Hitler or a Mussolini, Schlesinger ventured, but was more like “a Latin American dictator, a Vargas or a Perón . . . like them, he was most threatened by his own arrogance and cupidity, his weakness for soft living and his rage for personal power.” Taken together with the anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler “radio priest” Father Coughlin, whose weekly broadcasts attracted tens of millions, these demagogues, though “preaching competing gospels . . . seemed to represent a common group and to express a common impulse,” namely “Old America in resentful revolt.”37

  This popular swell, supplemented by an unholy alliance of the business community, the “underground creature, pallid but vicious” of the “communist conspiracy,” and attacks on the legality of the New Deal from the judiciary, provoked in Roosevelt an “ordeal by indecision” and momentarily put him “in retreat.” Only when he recognized the “posture of indiscriminate, stupid, and vindictive opposition” did he summon “a group of progressives to the White House” for “candid and unrestrained talks” that signaled he “meant to take a progressive stand and force the fighting on that line.” The result was the second New Deal, a program, says Schlesinger, that deployed, often nervously, the concepts embraced by the likes of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis and economist John Maynard Keynes, moving the emphasis of the New Deal from a managed to a mixed economy.38

  Looking toward the 1936 presidential election, Herbert Hoover, FDR’s predecessor as president, announced that the campaign would be another “holy crusade for liberty.” But it was the apparent economic miracle of 1936 that would give Roosevelt “a propitious climate for a presidential election,” Schlesinger writes, listing the spectacular data that showed how national income had risen by 50 percent and unemployment fallen by nearly half since 1933, with gross earnings in the second quarter of the year 70 percent higher than in the first. On the back of such gains, Roosevelt won by a landslide in November, carrying forty-six of the forty-eight states against Alf Landon, an amiable but lightweight Republican candidate who lacked Long’s extremism (The Kingfish was assassinated in 1935) but also his fire. Roosevelt succeeded by blending ideas with pragmatism. “This fluidity was Roosevelt’s delight,” Schlesinger wrote, using a familiar naval analogy, “and he floated upon it with the confidence of an expert sailor, who could detect currents and breezes invisible to others, hear the slap of the waves on distant rocks, smell squalls beyond the horizon and make infallible landfalls in the blackest of fogs.” With this critical vision blended with the reality of politics, Roosevelt had recovered from the torpor of 1935 and restored his command in time to win a second term and see off the demagogues, Fascists, Communists, and their like who had threatened the Republic. “The whole point of the New Deal,” Schlesinger summed up, “lay in its faith in ‘the exercise of Democracy.’ ”39

  Schlesinger’s notion of the two New Deals became one of the defining metaphors by which people came to understand a shift in priorities in 1935 as the planners gave way to the decentralizers. Like many successful interpretations, this one opened a rich vein of scholarship that eventually dismissed it as overly simplistic because it blurred the ways in which planning and regulation occurred throughout the entire period. In the 1960s, New Left historians such as Barton Bernstein and Paul Conkin attacked FDR as a capitalist lackey and the New Deal itself as a continuous attempt to prop up a failing system. More persuasively, subsequent New Deal historians such as Jordan A. Swartz, Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, and Alan Brinkley presented the period as an exercise in state capitalism and state-building. Schlesinger’s individual ideas, particularly the links back to Andrew Jackson, may have been “consigned to the historiographical dustbin,” Morton Keller points out, but even by the beginning of the twenty-first century, “the major conceptual framework of the literature is the distinction between a recovery-minded First New Deal rooted in the past, and a reform-minded Second New Deal that under the political, intellectual, and demographic pressures of change unfolded into something broader and more original.” It was Schlesinger, along with the likes of Richard Hofstadter and William Leuchtenburg, who created that enduring and influential framework.40

  Reviewers at the time lauded The Politics of Upheaval. Orville Prescott, who apparently had a monopoly on the series in the daily New York Times, continued to praise Schlesinger as “one of the ablest contemporary American historians” and for “his mastery of a lively and readable style”; as importantly, he judged that long after the author’s writings as a “busy participant in partisan politics” were forgotten, “Mr. Schlesinger’s monumental history, The Age of Roosevelt, seems destined to survive.” For the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Schlesinger was lucky enough to get a notice from his friend, the British historian Denis Brogan (“Lunched with Denis Brogan,” Schlesinger had reported from London the previous year).41 Brogan praised Schlesinger’s “masterly achievement” and echoed the religious language and purpose of the series. The current volume made evident that “the serpent was loose in Eden,” while “the New Dealers were not at all a band of brothers, unless we take Cain and Abel as a representative sample of fraternal relations.” His reservation, one echoed in other reviews, was that the “outer world is remote.” In the American Historical Review, Robert E. Burke pointed out that �
��we must continue to withhold judgment on whether the exclusion of foreign policy for systematic handling in later volumes is worth the cost of a loss in the sense of sequence.”42

  Toward the end of The Politics of Upheaval, Schlesinger, in a paean to liberal pragmatism, praised Roosevelt and the New Deal for their “denial of either-or” and “indifference to ideology,” which allowed the president “to steer between the extreme of chaos and tyranny.” It was in many ways a devious piece of counter-intuition, because “either-or” was precisely what Schlesinger had offered readers of The Age of Roosevelt. If his subject in all three volumes had been what he called the “battlefield of ideas,” then he knew that his books were an exercise in intellectual warfare in his own times.

  That warfare would form the basis of much of the historiographical debate about the books and the New Deal more generally in the years to come, as revisionists rehabilitating the presidencies of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover took aim at Schlesinger’s overtly political worldview. “Schlesinger’s selectivity,” noted one, T. B. Silvers in Coolidge and the Historians, “puts him in the role of a prosecutor who wrenches one damaging remark out of a witness’ mouth and then shuts him up before he can say anything else.” Yet even among those who disagreed with Schlesinger, or had even been his victim, many recognized that he played an enterprising role within a profession that could often be timid and narrow. “As a historian, Schlesinger is bold, opinionated, somewhat arrogant, and occasionally wrong,” ventured Gerald W. Johnson, author of Andrew Jackson: An Epic in Homespun. “But at least Schlesinger has the enormous merit of saying something; he is committed to the old-fashioned and perhaps illiberal theory that there is not only a difference, but a perceptible difference between a scoundrel and an honest man, and he never ends a study with the arid recommendation that the subject deserves further study.”43

  Schlesinger knew what he wanted to say, but so too, it appears, did he know when to keep his mouth shut. At the end of volume III, he left Roosevelt enjoying the spoils of victory, looking forward to a second term. Ahead for the historian lay the choppy waters of the “court packing plan” and stunted economic growth along with the foreign policy that had failed to capture Schlesinger’s imagination during the Commonwealth Lectures in London.

  In the final lines of The Politics of Upheaval, Schlesinger quotes the reelected president declaring, “I accept the commission you have tendered me.” The same could not be said of Schlesinger himself: he would leave FDR in 1936 and never publish another line in The Age of Roosevelt series. The continuation of Schlesinger’s grand liberal narrative of American history would require another heroic figure to propel the story into a new age.44

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ARE YOU READY TO WORK AT THE WHITE HOUSE?

  Democratic convention, Los Angeles, July 15, 1960. “My own pleasure in national politics is coming to an end,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote gloomily in his journal that summer. An era was drawing to a close. Inside Adlai Stevenson’s suite at the Sheraton-West Hotel, veterans of the ’52 and ’56 presidential campaigns milled around, making low-key small talk and trying to affect nonchalance in the face of disappointment. “As I saw them there together, I suddenly saw one great reason for Stevenson’s failure,” Schlesinger wrote. “The Stevenson crowd consisted almost entirely of such nice people.” Four days earlier John F. Kennedy had outmaneuvered Stevenson to be the Democratic nominee and then chosen Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate. These events confirmed the arrival of a new order, signifying the triumph of “the professional” candidate over “the amateur.” It was, Schlesinger recognized, “inevitable” that Kennedy should have beaten the two-time presidential loser, but he could not shake the sense that a certain civilized quality “has gone out of national politics.”

  As for the Kennedy campaign to come, “I don’t really much care whether I get into it or not.” Certainly he admired JFK’s “strength and ability.” But the candidate himself, Schlesinger found cold, and the ruthlessness he displayed during the convention ensured that “my affection for him and personal confidence in him have declined.” Indeed he dreaded having done too good a job on the senator from Massachusetts. Kennedy, a keen historian, had read the first two volumes of The Age of Roosevelt carefully. “I fear he may have learned too well the lesson of the last part of The Coming of the New Deal,” its author worried. “He has commented to me several times in the past how illuminating he found my discussion of FDR’s executive methods. I am quite sure now that Kennedy has most of FDR’s lesser qualities. Whether he has FDR’s greater qualities is the problem for the future.”1

  Like Schlesinger, “Jack” Kennedy had been born in 1917 and attended Harvard, where the two men should have been classmates. But Arthur had been fast tracked, so rather than join the class of 1940, he found himself the “runt of the litter” in the class of 1938 with Jack’s older brother Joe Jr., with whom he had no contact. It is impossible to know whether Schlesinger and the younger Kennedy might have become Harvard friends, although given that Arthur was a brainiac and Jack roomed with college athletes and, said his contemporary, Lem Billings, was “more fun than anyone I’ve ever known,” it seems unlikely. Nevertheless, Arthur’s accelerated career meant that in the relationship he always played catch-up socially. Kennedy’s Harvard roommate, Jimmy Rousmaniere, believed that loyalty meant everything to Jack, pointing out how he kept close to school friends such as Congressman Torby Macdonald and Billings throughout his life even as he rose to power. Later he would develop another similar circle comprising Kenny O’Donnell, Dave Powers, and Larry O’Brien (“the Irish Brotherhood’) in which loyalty was paramount. The relationship, when it did come for Schlesinger, would be of another less visceral, more intellectual kind, and was one that Kennedy himself would acknowledge as important. Reading the book by Theodore White (also Harvard ’38), The Making of the President: 1960 the following year, JFK pointed out the parallel with Schlesinger’s “men around the president” in The Age of Roosevelt. “When I read your Roosevelt books, I thought what towering figures those men around Roosevelt were,” Schlesinger records him saying. “Then I read Teddy’s book and realized that they were just [Theodore] Sorensen and [Richard] Goodwin and you.” Interestingly, White actually cites Sorensen, Goodwin, and JFK’s chief of legislative research, Mike Feldman, as Kennedy’s “personal” brain trust, putting Arthur instead in the “academic” brain trust that also included the likes of future national security advisor, Harvard’s McGeorge Bundy. Either way, Schlesinger would finally bond with Kennedy, but theirs was essentially a meeting of minds rather than personalities.2

  Kennedy’s enthusiasm for history and historical biography was certainly genuine. Like Schlesinger, it took family connections to publish his Harvard senior thesis, Why England Slept, a study of British appeasement in the 1930s. All the same he maintained a keen interest in history throughout his life. “He would read walking, he’d read at the table, at meals, he read after dinner, he’d read in the bathtub,” Jacqueline, his wife, would say, recalling how Kennedy each Sunday would circle the new books in the New York Times Sunday Book Review that he wanted to read. Schlesinger said of Kennedy, “History was full of heroes for him and he reveled in stately cadences of historical prose. Situations, scenes and quotations stuck in his mind for the rest of his life.” Even in the middle of the Democratic race in the summer of 1960, Kennedy would suddenly, but to no one’s surprise, compare Lyndon Johnson to the nineteenth-century British prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, both of whom he thought “were omnipotent in Parliament but had no popularity in the country.” Kennedy had a particular taste for political biography, with favorites including David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne, a tale of sexual scandal and high politics, and John Quincy Adams and the Union by Samuel Flagg Bemis, the story of a son trying to shake off the legacy of a famous but unpopular father. When asked by a reporter in 1957 what he was reading, he cited Wilson: The Road to the White House by Arthur S. Link, and The Crisis of the Old Or
der by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.3

  Kennedy and Schlesinger ran across each other in Washington immediately after the war, usually as part of Joe Alsop’s Georgetown dining circle, but it was not until the 1950s that the beginnings of a working relationship emerged. In June 1955, Kennedy, now a senator, told Schlesinger that during recuperation from serious back surgery he had written a book on the political courage of US senators and asked him to read it. “I would certainly be appreciative for whatever you could do to improve its historical accuracy, style and interest, and general contribution,” Kennedy wrote, “and if you feel that any or all of these chapters are inadequate, I would be most grateful if you would frankly tell me so.”4

  Schlesinger read what would become Profiles in Courage while on vacation that summer. Years afterwards he would write that his “only assistance . . . was to suggest some books that he might look at.” His actual contribution was more forthright: a 2,000-word manuscript review as if this were a draft by an academic colleague. “I have read your book with great interest and admiration,” Schlesinger wrote in early July. “It seems to me, in the main, historically sound, skillfully written and a genuine contribution to political courage.” So far, as expected. But among Schlesinger’s greatest assets was his ability to speak truth unsparingly to power and influence. He followed with an interrogation of the text that ranged from the correction of factual inaccuracies to criticism of flaws in structure and analysis. He noted, for example, that the chapter on Daniel Webster, one of the eight senators profiled, was “not particularly persuasive to me” for reasons that were outlined, not least that Schlesinger believed in fact that President Zachary Taylor, not Webster, “was right” on the famous Compromise of 1850. Even more problematic was the chapter on Senator Robert A. Taft, who had taken a stand against the Nuremberg Trials for trying Nazi war criminals under ex post facto laws. “I am not persuaded by this chapter at all,” Schlesinger wrote. “The Taft incident took place elsewhere [outside the Senate]. For another, I find it hard to recollect Taft’s doing anything else which required political courage. . . . He showed no courage at all in the face of McCarthy.” This last comment, perhaps innocently delivered, must have stung, as it was a criticism often thrown at the Kennedys about McCarthyism. (Patriarch Joe Sr. was friends with McCarthy; JFK’s brother Bobby briefly worked for him; their sisters Eunice, Pat, and Jean went on dates with him; and Jack would be the only Democratic senator not to call for McCarthy’s censure in 1954, a fact he explained away by citing convalescence from back surgery.) Concluding, Schlesinger noted that he had “put my doubts about the Webster and Taft chapters in strong language to save time, and because I know you would like these doubts to be expressed vigorously while there is still time.” But, he added, “it is your book and you cannot expect to please every reader!”5