Nothing to Fear
Page 8
The Panic of 1893, and the serious depression it ushered in, forced the family to move to nearby Olmsted Falls, where Moley’s grandparents owned land. Moley pursued an education as far as he could in the tiny local school system, leaving after tenth grade to attend college. He worked as a teacher in Olmsted Falls, and quickly became school superintendent, supervising three other teachers. At the same time, Moley embarked on a career in local politics. He was elected village clerk of Olmsted Falls in 1907, and mayor in 1911. The high point of Moley’s brief mayoral career was a successful drive to bring electric lights to Olmsted Falls. Moley’s youthful stint as a mayor hardly thrust him into the political big leagues, but it helped to prepare him for the greater challenges that lay ahead. When Roosevelt’s campaign manager, James Farley, asked during the 1932 campaign, “What the hell do you, a college professor, know about politics?” Moley could say that he had been elected to office three years before Roosevelt entered the New York State Legislature.24
Moley’s ambitions reached beyond small-town Ohio. He earned a master’s degree at Oberlin College and began teaching high school history in Cleveland. In the early 1900s, Cleveland was a bastion of progressivism, and its municipal government was a leading innovator. Moley did his master’s thesis on one of the city’s leading institutions, the municipal court. While he was at Oberlin, Charles A. Beard, the noted Columbia historian, came through to lecture. Beard had just completed his Progressive Era classic, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, which argued that the Constitution reflected the Founding Fathers’ personal financial interests. Moley struck up an acquaintance with Beard and, at his urging, continued his graduate studies in the fall of 1914 at Columbia, where Beard became his most powerful academic influence.25
Moley returned to Ohio in 1916 to take a position at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and married Eva Dall, whom he knew from his school days in Olmsted Falls. He became active in progressive causes, including the drive to “Americanize” Cleveland’s recent immigrants. Moley was considering entering elective politics when he accepted the position of director of the reform-minded Cleveland Foundation. A crime wave had hit the city, and one of Moley’s biggest projects was an investigation of the criminal justice system. The Cleveland Crime Study, on which he collaborated with Dean Roscoe Pound and Professor Felix Frankfurter of Harvard Law School, led to major reforms. Moley went on to conduct similar studies in eight other states. On the strength of his criminal justice work, he was invited to return to Columbia in 1923 as an associate professor of government at Barnard College. Not long after their arrival in New York, Eva gave birth to twin boys. Moley became a full professor of public law in 1928, and he would soon publish two books, Politics and Criminal Prosecution and Our Criminal Courts.26
When Governor Al Smith appointed him research director of the Crime Commission of New York State, Moley came into contact with Louis Howe. Howe had gotten a position, with Roosevelt’s help, on the National Crime Commission, and knowing little about crime, he sought Moley’s guidance. When Roosevelt ran for governor in 1928, Howe invited Moley to help with the campaign. It was, for someone with Moley’s interest in politics, an irresistible offer. Moley was impressed with Roosevelt from their first meeting at campaign headquarters. He was struck, he would later say, by Roosevelt’s “handsome figure” and “the smile that was so soon to win the affection of many million Americans.” Roosevelt asked Moley to prepare a memorandum on criminal justice reform that could be the basis for a campaign address. Moley wrote the memo, and Roosevelt turned it into a speech that he delivered in the Bronx, in which he called for the creation of a commission to explore ways to make the courts more efficient. When Roosevelt became governor, he appointed Moley to the State Commission on the Administration of Justice.27
After his reelection in 1930, Roosevelt began planning his presidential run. Roosevelt had experienced political advisers, including Howe and James Farley, the Irish-American state Democratic Party official who would manage the campaign. What Roosevelt did not have were policy experts who could advise him on the subjects a presidential candidate had to have positions on. Roosevelt’s counsel, Samuel Rosenman, suggested that he invite a group of academic advisers to join the campaign, and Roosevelt readily agreed. Rosenman suggested Moley to head up the group. One of Moley’s great strengths, as far as Roosevelt and Rosenman were concerned, was that, despite his youthful exposure to midwestern progressivism, he did not have particularly strong political views. Moley accepted at once. When the number of academic advisers began to grow, James M. Kieran, a reporter for The New York Times, wrote a brief story on the group, which he dubbed the “brains trust.” The name, in slightly modified form, stuck. Rosenman and Moley would later battle over who deserved credit for creating Roosevelt’s famed Brain Trust. Rosenman argued that the original concept had been his. Moley, who recruited the members and led the group, insisted the Brain Trust had been his doing. “Sometimes the lady who smacks the champagne bottle against the ship’s prow,” Moley said, “has the illusion that she is causing the ship to slide down the ways.”28
Moley was the Brain Trust’s chief recruiter. He began at Columbia because he thought it best to bring in people he knew, and he figured the proximity would make it easy to meet regularly. He did not have to look far for his first recruit, Rexford Tugwell, a young economist who lived one building down from him on Claremont Avenue, near the Columbia campus. Tugwell had been born in the town of Sinclairville in upstate New York, the son of a successful businessman who owned a vegetable and fruit cannery. He had studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Columbia faculty, where he was an expert on agricultural economics. Although he was a New Yorker, Tugwell kept in close touch with farm issues across the country and abroad. He had traveled to the Soviet Union and Europe, and had written about farm conditions in both. His research had left him with the conviction that government planning was necessary to make farming more efficient. Tugwell had begun speaking of the importance of government, industry, and agriculture working together—an idea he would later brand a “concert of interests.” Tugwell could see the toll the Depression was taking on farm communities and on his own neighborhood, where a Hooverville had formed and was rapidly expanding. He was angry that Hoover was doing so little. When Moley approached him, Tugwell quickly signed on. At his Brain Trust interview, the brilliant, charming, and strikingly good-looking Tugwell made a strong impression. “Rex was like a cocktail,” Moley said. “His conversation picked you up and made your brain race along.”29
Moley’s next major recruit was Adolf A. Berle, Jr., a corporation law expert at Columbia Law School. Berle, a child prodigy, had graduated from Harvard Law School at twenty-one, the youngest graduate in the school’s history. He had just finished writing a pathbreaking book with the economist Gardiner C. Means, which argued that modern corporations posed a greater threat to the public good than corporations of the past, and had to be more highly regulated. Berle had a reputation for being difficult—his critics said he continued to be a child long after he had stopped being a prodigy. Moley, however, was impressed with Berle’s ideas about business. When Moley stopped by his office on a recruitment visit, Berle responded that he already had a candidate for president, Newton Baker, a former reform mayor of Cleveland who had been Wilson’s secretary of war. Moley said that the campaign wanted his policy advice, not his political support, which was of little value. Berle laughed and accepted the invitation. He drew up a memorandum for Roosevelt that laid out what would become a New Deal article of faith—that the federal government had to start taking more responsibility for the nation’s economic condition. “In 1932, this was a revolutionary and dangerous conception,” Berle would later say. “The federal government was there to keep order, do certain reform work, assist from time to time, but the normal processes of laissez-faire economics were supposed to provide the results.”30
Moley did not do the recruiting alone.
He brought prospective Brain Trust members in to meet with Rosenman and Basil “Doc” O’Connor, Roosevelt’s former law partner. If the lawyers approved, the recruits went upstate to meet Roosevelt. Tugwell vividly recalled his own meeting. “Roosevelt was sitting on the front porch of the big Governor’s mansion, with his shirt open and his coat off although it wasn’t a terribly warm day,” Tugwell said. “He was smoking a cigarette as he always did in his long holder, with his chin up as it always was. He wasn’t frightened by anything.” Tugwell was invited to dine with Roosevelt, and they talked late into the night about agriculture and the plight of the farmers. Tugwell was deeply moved by his first encounter with Roosevelt. “Meeting him,” Tugwell would later say, “was like coming into contact with destiny itself.” Roosevelt had also been impressed. Tugwell made the cut, but not everyone Moley proposed for membership in the Brain Trust met with Roosevelt’s approval. Another Columbia economics professor, Frederick C. Mills, was rejected because he had strongly held views on monetary policy. Roosevelt turned down other would-be Brain Trusters who showed up with fixed positions, inflexible “plans” for solving particular problems, or allegiance to one of the faddish movements, like “technocracy,” that were sweeping the country. What Roosevelt was looking for, above all, was simply good advice about how to solve the nation’s problems. “You tell me what you think and what you think I ought to do,” Roosevelt told Berle. “Leave the politics to me. That’s a dirty business.”31
The Brain Trust was headquartered in the Roosevelt Hotel, separate from Roosevelt’s political advisers, who operated out of the Biltmore. While Farley and Edward J. Flynn, the Bronx Democratic boss, plotted strategy for winning the nomination, members of the Brain Trust researched policy issues and wrote memos that could be turned into campaign speeches. It was Moley who discussed the memos with Roosevelt and drafted the speeches. This arrangement was partly due to Moley’s unusual skill at speechwriting, partly a matter of his desire to be in control, and partly a reflection of his conviction that, as he insisted, “a speech cannot be written by a committee.” Moley led the group with a firm hand. He could be abrasive, and he was known for his occasionally sharp temper. Moley drafted the first of the Brain Trust speeches himself, a ten-minute radio address that aired on the Lucky Strike Hour on April 7, 1932. The speech, which argued for a stronger response to the Depression, introduced a phrase that Roosevelt would forever be associated with, “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Other members of the Brain Trust got their own chances to shape Roosevelt’s message. In a Jefferson Day address in St. Paul, Minnesota, Roosevelt gave voice to Tugwell’s long-standing belief that the needs of farmers, workers, and businessmen had to be blended into a “a fair and just concert of interests.” Berle’s call for stronger regulation of corporations inspired a rousing September 1932 address to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club that came to be known as the “manifesto of the New Deal.” In the speech, Roosevelt went further than ever before in laying out his vision of progressive government. “We are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy,” he warned. “The day of enlightened administration has come,” Roosevelt declared, in which the federal government had no choice but to play a more active role in reining in corporate excesses and planning industrial policy.32
Early in the campaign, Moley, consulting with Tugwell and Berle, wrote a memorandum that distilled the Brain Trust’s thinking, which had evolved over many conversations with Roosevelt. The overarching theme of the memo, which Moley completed on May 19, was that Roosevelt should present a clear alternative to Hoover, “not a choice between two names for the same reactionary doctrine.” The key, Moley argued, was for Roosevelt to lead a party of “liberal thought” and “planned action,” which would advocate an active role for the federal government in fighting the Depression and helping its victims. The memo called for centralized economic planning, a favorite idea of Tugwell’s, which Roosevelt would incorporate into his first agricultural and industrial policies. It also advocated reform of the banking system and the securities industry, including separating investment and commercial banking. The memo urged relief for the unemployed and large-scale public works, but it also endorsed balancing the budget to restore confidence in the government. With those contradictory recommendations, the memo began to create a fundamental conflict—between spending more to fight the Depression and spending less to balance the budget—that would be a central tension of the Hundred Days. Moley’s introduction to the memo used the words “new deal” for the first time. Six weeks later, Roosevelt included the phrase in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, and an era got its name.33
Over the next few months, Moley and Roosevelt formed a close bond. Roosevelt traveled extensively during the campaign—in the eleven months before his inauguration, he covered 27,000 miles and visited forty-one states. For Roosevelt, getting out and meeting the voters was, Moley said, “unadulterated joy.” Moley often came along, carrying suitcases full of books, draft speeches, and policy memos, writing furiously as the campaign train traveled from town to town. It was an odd pairing, the easygoing, natural politician, born into privilege, and the somber, detail-oriented academic, who never forgot his modest Ohio upbringing. The two men were not friends—the gap in their roles and status was too great. Their relationship was, however, more than that of an ambitious candidate and an unusually talented and dedicated staff member. A real “intimacy developed,” Moley recalled, that offered Roosevelt “the relief and satisfaction of thinking aloud when we were together.”34
The Brain Trust kept working after the election, drawing up policy proposals for the new administration. The group worked on farm legislation, plans for regulating the securities market, and bankruptcy reform. Moley remained at the center of the action, “the one-man reception committee,” as Newsweek put it, “through whom ideas had to go to reach Roosevelt.” He also continued drafting the inaugural address. Moley’s importance was underscored during the interregnum when Hoover asked Roosevelt to come to the White House to discuss the handling of European war debts. England and other debtor nations had unilaterally announced their intention to defer payments on the debts they had incurred to the United States during the World War. Hoover was willing to negotiate, in exchange for those nations’ making concessions on other matters. Roosevelt, whose focus was more domestic, knew little about the debts and did not want to be drawn too deeply into a discussion of them with Hoover. He asked Moley to look into the matter. Moley was not an expert on war debts, but working with Berle, he did extensive research and prepared index cards with relevant questions to bring along to the White House. To Moley’s surprise, Roosevelt asked him to come to the November 22 meeting with Hoover. After a second meeting on the war debts in mid-January, Roosevelt instructed Hoover’s advisers to speak directly with Moley about them.35
Moley was eager to find out what role he would play in the new administration. Despite his close relationship with Roosevelt, he was having trouble getting a firm commitment. In late January, Moley told Tugwell of his frustration. “I advised Moley not to go further in his present anomalous role,” Tugwell wrote in his diary. “He has much work, many responsibilities, and no authority. F.D.R. is certainly not treating him—or me, for that matter—fairly in requiring so much of us without any acknowledgement of our position.” In early February, at Warm Springs, Moley put the question directly to Roosevelt, who said he hoped Moley would come with him to Washington. “I don’t have to tell you,” he said, “that I’ve found it easier to work with you than anyone else.” The obvious position for Moley was administrative assistant to the president, which would allow him to be Roosevelt’s closest day-today adviser. What stood in the way of this logical solution was Louis Howe, Roosevelt’s eccentric, longtime adviser, whom Tugwell described as “a little gnome of a man” who seemed likely to “blow away at any moment.” Howe had guided Roosevelt’s political career every step of the way, and as Samuel Rosenman noted, pr
omoting Roosevelt “was his main, if not his sole, mission in life.” Roosevelt, in turn, was tremendously loyal to Howe. In the new administration, Howe would be the presidential secretary, a position that would allow him to work out of a back office at the White House where he could be, as Roosevelt said, a “man of mystery.” Howe would also move into the White House, where he would live until his death in 1936. There would be two assistant secretaries, Stephen Early, a forty-four-year-old former wire service reporter from Virginia, who would handle press relations, and Marvin McIntyre, an affable fifty-five-year-old Kentucky bachelor, who would be in charge of the president’s calendar. The insecure Howe was pathologically jealous of anyone else getting close to his boss. “He guarded his man Roosevelt just like iron,” Frances Perkins recalled. Howe was adamant that Moley not be given a job in the White House, and Roosevelt deferred to his old friend.36
That left the question of where to put Moley. Roosevelt said that he had been “digging through the Congressional Directory” and it struck him that assistant secretary of state would be the ideal job. It had no statutory duties, which would keep him free to work as Roosevelt’s top aide, and it had the added advantage of being located in the State, War and Navy Building, across the street from the West Wing of the White House. That would be far enough away to satisfy Howe but close enough that Moley could easily shuttle back and forth to Roosevelt’s office. Roosevelt conceded that assistant secretary of state was “nominally subordinate” to the secretary of state, but he insisted that if Moley took the job he would not have any significant State Department responsibilities. Moley told Roosevelt he thought he would be asking for trouble if he accepted that particular job. He was concerned about the vagueness of the job description, and it seemed to him that any Cabinet member would resent having an assistant who saw the president more often than he did. Moley joked that Roosevelt might as well post him in the Philippines, and Roosevelt replied, “No. You would be 8,000 miles away. I need you here.”37