by Adam Cohen
Another American tradition was born during the Hundred Days: opposition to the New Deal. Conservatives, whose most cherished ideals were under attack, started to speak out, objecting that Roosevelt was trying to become a dictator, and that his programs were un-American. The more time passed, the more outspoken these critics became. “Private fulminations and public carpings against the New Deal have become almost a routine of the business day,” Time magazine declared in the fall of 1934. H. L. Mencken, who frequently railed against the New Deal, insisted that it had done nothing of value. The Brain Trust was “the sorriest mob of mountebanks ever gathered together at one time,” he insisted. The best of them were merely “uplifters and do-gooders,” while the rest were “a miscellaneous rabble of vapid young pedagogs, out-of-work Y.M.C.A. secretaries, third-rate journalists, brief-less lawyers and soaring chicken-farmers.” As the 1936 election approached, William Randolph Hearst mobilized his twenty-eight newspapers, thirteen magazines, and eight radio stations against Roosevelt. “MOSCOW BACKS ROOSEVELT,” blared one headline that ran in all of the Hearst papers. Roosevelt was frequently denounced as a “traitor to his class.” He did not, however, let the denunciations deter him. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he declared on the eve of the 1936 election. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”5
There was also disaffection on the left. To Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist presidential candidate, the New Deal was an attempt “to cure tuberculosis with cough-drops.” Advocates for sharecroppers protested that too much was being done for wealthy farmers and not enough for poor ones. African Americans were frustrated that the New Deal did not challenge racial discrimination, largely because Roosevelt was reluctant to upset the white Southerners who were an important part of his electoral coalition. Leftists constantly called on the administration to take more radical steps—to nationalize the banks and industry or raise taxes on the wealthy. Some opposed the New Deal on a fundamental level, arguing that it sugarcoated the working class’s problems. “The unemployed,” insisted Abe Bluestein, a polemicist who opposed the NIRA, “must not suffer from any illusions of genuine relief from their heavy burdens under capitalism.” At the same time, many leftists worried that the New Deal was stealing their issues and their support. When Thomas saw his share of the popular vote fall sharply in 1936, he joked that the Socialist Party platform was being carried out by Roosevelt—“on a stretcher.”6
The majority of Americans, though—those who were neither far right nor far left—embraced the New Deal wholeheartedly. Its popularity was evident at the ballot box. In 1934, Democrats added twelve seats to their House majority and nine to their Senate majority, a rare case of the party in power gaining seats in an off-year election. “Boys—this is our hour,” a newly energized Harry Hopkins told his staff. “We’ve got to get everything we want—a works program, social security, wages and hours, everything—now or never.” A major reason the voters rallied around the New Deal was simply that it worked. With the launch of relief and public works, breadlines and Hoovervilles became more rare. At the end of Roosevelt’s first term, even Walter Lippmann acknowledged the progress:
There are still grave problems. But there is no overwhelming dangerous crisis. The mass of the people have recovered their courage and their hope.
They are no longer hysterically anxious about the immediate present. They have recovered not only some part of their standard of life but also their self-possession.
Roosevelt’s critics like to point out that the New Deal did not end the Great Depression. Although it took World War II to restore the unemployment rate to where it had been before the Great Crash, the New Deal did produce steady economic improvement. The nation’s total production increased significantly between 1934 and 1936. By 1937, the gross national product reached 1929 levels. Unemployment had fallen to 14 percent in 1937, still high, but far below the rate of March 1933. Just as important, for people who remained unemployed, New Deal programs were providing a safety net. Most of the 20 million Americans who received relief from the FERA at its height, and the millions who took CCC, CWA, or WPA jobs, would have been destitute if the nation had stuck by its Hoover Era principles.7
The New Deal evolved. Roosevelt moved to the left in 1934 and 1935, prodded by the persistence of the hard times and the demands for greater reform made by three outspoken populists: Senator Huey Long, whose “Share the Wealth” movement called for the government to provide poor Americans with the funds to buy a home, an automobile, and a radio; Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest who railed against financial elites; and Dr. Francis Townsend, a retired California physician who was leading a campaign for old-age pensions. In 1935, Roosevelt embarked on the so-called “Second New Deal,” more liberal and more critical of big business than the first. This was the era that ushered in the Works Progress Administration, the National Labor Relations Act, and Social Security. The voters continued to support the New Deal in its new incarnation. In 1936, Roosevelt would win reelection against Alfred Landon—an anti-New Deal Republican who attacked Social Security as a “cruel hoax”—taking 61 percent of the vote. In his second inaugural address, Roosevelt declared that he saw “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” and insisted that “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”8
There were rough spots along the way. In 1937, Roosevelt decided—in a return to the ideas of the Economy Act—to slash spending. He ordered cuts in New Deal programs, including such popular ones as the CCC. It was a reassertion of his inherent fiscal conservatism—Tugwell observed that even when Roosevelt was engaging in deficit spending “he had a secret longing to balance the national accounts.” As historian Alan Brinkley has written, “disaster followed.” In the “Roosevelt recession” of 1937 and early 1938, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 48 percent in seven months. Roosevelt eventually reversed the cuts and resumed deficit spending. He had other setbacks, notably his misguided effort to pack the Supreme Court in 1937 after the conservative Court overturned many of his New Deal initiatives. Opposition to the New Deal grew in these later years, but even so, the Fair Labor Standards Act, one of its greatest achievements, passed Congress in June 1938. Despite the setbacks, the American people continued to believe in Roosevelt and his agenda. The Republican Party had spent years running against the New Deal, but in the 1940 presidential election, its nominee, Wendell Willkie, was far more sympathetic. When Frances Perkins read the Republican Party platform that year she discovered to her delight that, as she put it, “every single New Deal thing that we had done was mentioned” in it. “Well, God’s holy name be praised,” she exclaimed to an aide. “No matter who gets elected we’ve won.”9
Raymond Moley, the adviser who was closest to Roosevelt during the Hundred Days, was also the first to leave. At the end of the special session, sixty-six nations gathered in London for the World Economic Conference. Conservatives had high hopes that if the gathering could reach an agreement to stabilize world currencies, and if nations like England and Germany could be persuaded to restore the gold standard, the conference could bring the global depression to an end. Roosevelt did not share these views, but he thought the meeting could be valuable if its focus were expanded to include issues beyond currency, such as tariffs and stimulating international trade. He named Secretary of State Cordell Hull to lead a delegation of congressmen, businessmen, and other prominent people. A week later, Roosevelt sent Moley to London to join the delegation.10
Moley’s trip was a disaster. During the Hundred Days, he had developed a reputation for haughtiness with some members of the administration, and his relations with Hull, his nominal boss, were especially strained. Moley “treated all his associates in the State Department from Hull down to the desk officers off-handedly,” Herbert Feis, an economic adviser i
n the State Department, said. It did not help that Moley was being publicly credited with having more influence with Roosevelt than his top Cabinet members. In May, Time magazine had put Moley on its cover, just weeks after Hull had received the same honor. It was Moley, though, who was described as “Roosevelt’s closest, most intimate advisor,” and who was portrayed as the key strategist of the World Economic Conference. When Moley arrived in London, it appeared to many observers that he, not Hull, really represented Roosevelt. That impression was underscored when Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald asked Hull to send Moley over on his arrival, adding, “You can come too, if you like.” Moley took charge of the currency stabilization negotiations and signed on to an innocuous agreement whose terms were generally favorable to the dollar. Roosevelt, who had become wary of tying his hands on monetary policy, sent word that the conference should stop trying to reach an agreement to stabilize world currencies and should focus instead on its main purpose, “to better and perhaps to cure fundamental economic ills.” Roosevelt’s “bombshell” message, as it came to be known, blew up the conference.11
Moley, who was wounded by the president’s rejection of his efforts, returned to Washington in defeat. He also came back to an irreparably damaged relationship with his direct boss. In London, Hull had come across a confidential cable that Moley sent Roosevelt disparaging his abilities. “That piss-ant Moley,” Warburg quoted Hull as saying, “here he curled up at mah feet and let me stroke his head like a huntin’ dog and then he goes and bites me in the ass!” Moley’s fears about accepting the position of assistant secretary of state had been realized. Hull, who was insecure from the beginning about having a subordinate who saw the president more than he did, was now convinced that Moley was an enemy. He suspected, as he and Moley discussed in an awkward phone call, that Moley was really after his job.12
The end for Moley did not come right away. Roosevelt was cordial at first, but within weeks he tried to get Moley to undertake a criminal justice investigation in Hawaii. Moley recognized the offer as an attempt to get him out of Washington and turned it down. He reluctantly agreed to take a position as a special assistant in the Justice Department, where he would work on reforming kidnapping laws, but he could not accept his growing distance from Roosevelt. In late August, Moley resigned. The departure of the man who was, until recently, Roosevelt’s closest aide mystified other members of the administration. Grace Tully, Roosevelt’s secretary, thought Hull had been the driving force. “Moley faded out after trying unsuccessfully to climb over the top of Cordell Hull,” she said. “As always in such cases, the President supported his Cabinet officer and Moley went off to sell his wares elsewhere.” Tugwell was convinced that Roosevelt’s decision had been guided by electoral politics. “Hull, as a conservative Southerner, was indispensable,” he argued. “Moley was expendable.”13
Moley was, in any case, already thinking about leaving the administration. As early as May, he had been talking with Mary Rumsey and Averell Harriman, daughter and son of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, about their buying The Washington Post, and Moley becoming editor. More recently, he had been making plans to found a weekly magazine with Harriman and Vincent Astor. When Moley left the administration, he helped launch Today, which merged into Newsweek in 1937. The magazine was originally promoted as a vehicle for explaining the New Deal. Moley started out defending Roosevelt against the charges that were being lobbed at him from the right. He also spoke out against Nazism and argued for helping refugees from Fascism. Moley’s relations with Roosevelt remained good, and he traveled frequently to Washington to serve as an adviser and speechwriter. Before the 1934 election, Moley insisted that “the Republican party will have to accept the general principles of the New Deal” and that the Democratic Party would be the nation’s main party “for many years to come.”14
Even during the Hundred Days, liberals like Tugwell had observed that Moley was drifting rightward. That movement gained force after he left the administration. Samuel Rosenman recalled a dinner at the White House at which Roosevelt had begun “twitting Moley about his new conservatism and about the influence of his ‘new, rich friends’ on his recent writings.” From that night on, Rosenman said, there was a rift between the two men. In the 1936 presidential campaign, Moley seized on a Gallup poll and predicted that Republican Alf Landon would win. It was an indication, he said, that the “continuance of Leftist reform” was a mistake. In 1937, Moley spoke out against Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices so it would uphold New Deal legislation. The court-packing plan, he said, “strikes at the heart of democratic government.” By the following spring, Moley was speaking out against the New Deal itself. When Roosevelt prepared to seek an unprecedented third term, Moley publicly argued against it. Debating Tugwell, his onetime Brain Trust colleague, at a forum at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, he declared that “the thirst for power is the original sin of rulers.”15
The final break came in 1939, when Moley published After Seven Years, which The New York Times called “a long and hostile analysis not only of” Roosevelt’s “policies but of his motives and intelligence.” Moley said that when he first got to know Roosevelt he liked him “for the same elemental reasons that millions of other people were soon to like him—for his vibrant aliveness, his warmth, his sympathy, his activism.” But Moley presented Roosevelt as someone who had grown power-hungry from “a kind of mental autointoxication.” Many people who remained loyal to Roosevelt agreed with Tugwell, who called After Seven Years “one of the cruelest books I know of.” When a Cabinet member asked Roosevelt what he thought of it, according to gossip columnist Walter Winchell, he responded simply, “I trusted him.” When Willkie challenged Roosevelt in 1940, Moley was caustic about his old boss. He argued that Roosevelt had embarked on a four-phase drive to expand his power—the passage of sweeping New Deal bills; the attempt to pack the Supreme Court; his drive to defeat Democrats who did not agree with him in the 1938 congressional elections; and his campaign for a third term. Moley declared them, in a bitter twist on the image Roosevelt had used against Hoover, “the four horsemen of autocracy.” In 1948, Moley supported Dewey over Truman, and four years later he published How to Keep Our Liberty: A Program for Political Action, which argued that America was in danger of lapsing into “statism” and socialism. In 1954, Moley retired from the Columbia faculty, to concentrate on his writing. By the 1960s, he had become a Goldwater Republican.16
Moley had one more memoir in him, which he published in 1966. The First New Deal added substantially to the historical record. Moley associated himself with the first New Deal, but not with the more progressive Second New Deal that followed. The book was less harsh than After Seven Years, but its tone was still negative. “Lives sometimes focus not on a major triumph, but on a major disappointment,” Time observed in its review. “Raymond Moley, now 80, has chosen to linger in a departed yesterday that let him down.” Moley died eight years later, in February 1975.17
People who knew the young Moley had trouble making sense of his trajectory. He and Roosevelt had been close, and they accomplished a great deal together. Moley was unhappy with his position in the new administration, and felt badly treated when he was eased out, but he continued to work with Roosevelt afterward. He strongly disagreed with the court-packing plan, but many people in the administration, including Frances Perkins, felt the same way, and still remained loyal to Roosevelt. To his fellow New Dealers, Moley’s decision to publish a caustic memoir in 1939, when Roosevelt was preparing to run for a third term, was the hardest to understand. Tugwell pondered the question in his own, more laudatory memoir. “I could not say how many times since 1939 I have been asked: ‘What happened to Ray Moley?’ ” he wrote in The Democratic Roosevelt. “I do not yet know how to answer.”18
Lewis Douglas would be the next to go. By the end of the Hundred Days, his relationship with Roosevelt—who had once called his budget director “in many ways the greatest ‘find’ of the administr
ation”—had deteriorated badly. Douglas could not forgive Roosevelt for going off the gold standard, which he believed would ruin the economy and put the nation at risk. He was also bitter about the administration’s efforts to help the Depression’s victims. Years later, economists would conclude that Roosevelt had been right on both counts. Nations that went off the gold standard recovered from the Depression faster than those that remained on it. John Maynard Keynes would later show that increased government spending of the sort Roosevelt approved was the best antidote to a depression.19
Had Douglas been less emphatic in his views, he might have accepted Roosevelt’s priorities. Instead, he continued to resist, even after the National Industrial Recovery Act made large-scale public works the law of the land. On July 1, 1933, at a meeting of the Special Board for Public Works, the committee created to oversee NIRA public works, Douglas argued against spending all of the money that had been allocated. It was unnecessary, he insisted, because the economy was improving at a “very rapid rate.” At the same time, Douglas argued that going forward with the spending that had been agreed to would increase the deficit to the point where it would be “very questionable as to whether or not the credit of the United States government will stand it.” Douglas was outvoted on the committee. Harold Ickes, the chairman, said simply that “the Act has been passed and we are called upon to administer it.”20
As the year wore on, Douglas became more frustrated. It was increasingly clear that the budget would not be balanced, and that federal spending would continue to grow. Henry Morgenthau witnessed one clash, when Douglas chided Roosevelt for breaking his pledge to the voters to be fiscally conservative. It was, Morgenthau later recalled, one of the few times he had ever seen Roosevelt angry. Douglas was also troubled by other parts of the NIRA, especially the codes of fair competition that Hugh Johnson had been developing with leaders of business and labor. The rules being imposed on private enterprise made his “blood boil.” In the Douglas family tradition, he was distraught that the codes made it easier for unions to organize. In December, Roosevelt and Douglas found themselves at loggerheads when they were working on a budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Douglas wanted to cap relief spending at $1 billion, although he was willing to accept as much as $2 billion. Roosevelt would not agree to either figure.21
