Jean Edward Smith
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Violence simmered beneath the surface. In Iowa, farmers declared a farm holiday, blocked highways with logs and telephone poles, smashed headlights, and punctured tires with their pitchforks. When authorities in Council Bluffs arrested fifty-five demonstrators, more than a thousand angry farmers threatened to storm the jail unless they were released. Wisconsin dairy farmers dumped milk on the roadsides and fought pitched battles with deputy sheriffs. In Nebraska, farm holiday leaders warned that unless the legislature took beneficial action, “200,000 of us are coming to Lincoln and we’ll tear that new State Capitol Building to pieces.” In Idaho and Minnesota, the governors declared moratoriums on mortgage foreclosures until state legislatures could enact debt relief measures. In North Dakota, Governor William Langer mobilized the National Guard to halt farm foreclosures.56
Hoover’s doctrinaire attachment to the free market precluded government intervention. Even more serious in terms of long-term recovery, the president did his utmost to inveigle FDR into endorsing the administration’s policy. “I am convinced,” Hoover wrote Roosevelt, “that an early statement by you will help restore confidence.” What Hoover had in mind was that FDR pledge to retain the gold standard, adopt a balanced budget, and impose additional taxes rather than raise money through government borrowing.57 Roosevelt should also disavow any effort to insure home mortgages, rule out loans to states and municipalities for public works, disclaim proposals for government development of hydroelectric power in the Tennessee Valley, and desist in his opposition to a national sales tax. “I realize that if these declarations be made by the President-elect,” Hoover wrote Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania a few days later, “he will have ratified the whole major program of the Republican Administration; that is, it means the abandonment of 90% of the so-called new deal.”58
Roosevelt refused to be drawn in. He delayed ten days replying to Hoover’s “cheeky” letter and then brushed the president’s request aside. “I am equally concerned with you in regard to the gravity of the present banking situation, but my thought is that it is so very deep-seated that the fire is bound to spread in spite of anything that is done by way of mere statements.”59
An exception to FDR’s refusal to bail the Republicans out was in foreign policy. During the campaign Roosevelt virtually ignored international affairs—“I think Hoover’s foreign policy is about right,” he told Raymond Moley—and he chose not to make an issue of it after the election.60 At FDR’s invitation, Secretary of State Stimson visited Hyde Park on January 9, 1933, a cold, blustery Monday morning with rain turning to sleet and then to snow. Stimson was closeted with Roosevelt from eleven in the morning until five-thirty in the afternoon and later said he was “touched, overwhelmed by the kindness he showed me.… We both spoke with the utmost freedom and informality.” Roosevelt endorsed the administration’s efforts to embargo the shipment of arms to belligerents,* remained lukewarm to a world economic conference, and raised a number of questions about Latin America. Most important, he agreed fully with the most controversial aspect of Republican foreign policy, the so-called Stimson Doctrine, by which the United States refused to recognize the fruits of military aggression, specifically the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. “I had never had a talk with him before,” Stimson confided to his diary that evening, “but had no difficulty getting on.… I was much impressed with his disability and the brave way in which he paid no attention to it whatever.”61
Roosevelt’s endorsement of the Stimson Doctrine created a tizzy among his advisers. Moley and Tugwell told FDR his commitment might trigger war with Japan. The president-elect was unmoved. War might indeed occur, he allowed. In fact, it might be inevitable, given Japan’s imperial ambitions. And if that were the case, “it might be better to have it now than later.”62 Roosevelt said he had taken to speaking with Stimson daily over the telephone and that he intended to see the policy through. As Moley remembered the meeting, “Roosevelt put an end to the discussion by looking up and recalling that his Delano ancestors used to trade with China. ‘I have always had the deepest sympathy for the Chinese. How could you expect me not to go along with Stimson on Japan?’ ”63
Roosevelt used the four months between November and March to prepare for the presidency. The brain trust continued to work on policy, while FDR concentrated on putting his team together. Howe would be going to Washington, of course, as chief of staff to the president (the post was called secretary to the president in those days), as would Farley as postmaster general—the traditional post for the dispenser of party patronage, with a hundred thousand jobs at his disposal. Missy LeHand and Grace Tully would take over the White House secretarial duties, joined by Louise Hackmeister as chief telephone operator.* Hacky, as she was called, had manned the switchboard in all of Roosevelt’s campaigns and had a legendary feel for who should speak to the Boss and who should not. Rounding out the presidential office were Marvin McIntyre as appointments secretary and Steve Early as press secretary, charter members of the Cuff Links Club dating from FDR’s run for the vice presidency in 1920.
The cabinet proved more complicated. For the senior positions at State and Treasury, Roosevelt turned to two old Wilsonians, Cordell Hull and Carter Glass. Hull in many ways epitomized the up-from-poverty yearnings of the New Deal. The son of a hardscrabble dirt farmer from the mountains of southern Appalachia, Hull had served in the Spanish-American War as a captain of Tennessee volunteers and been elected to Congress in 1906 and to the U.S. Senate in 1930. For more than a generation he had led the liberal cause in the South. He had been for Wilson before Baltimore and for Roosevelt before Chicago. Except for a lifelong devotion to free trade, his knowledge of foreign affairs was limited and his administrative skills were untested. But Roosevelt genuinely admired Hull’s idealism and personal dignity.* And he had a political base FDR could not ignore. “Cordell Hull is the only member of the Cabinet who brings me any political strength that I don’t have in my own right.”64
For Treasury, Carter Glass of Virginia had no competition. The architect of the Federal Reserve Act while a member of the House, secretary of the Treasury under Wilson, and now ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, the seventy-four-year-old Glass had been the party’s senior spokesman on public finance so long as anyone could remember. This was the one cabinet post on which Roosevelt had no wiggle room, and he made the offer to Glass at the same time he approached Hull. Both FDR and Glass were apprehensive. Glass was committed to hard currency, fiscal restraint, and a sound dollar. He deplored deficit spending. Roosevelt, on the other hand, was pragmatic: “We’re not going to throw ideas out of the window simply because they are labeled inflation.”65 When Glass declined because of ill health, the Roosevelt camp breathed a sigh of relief. To head Treasury, FDR immediately turned to Republican William H. Woodin, a respected New York industrialist who had helped bankroll each of Roosevelt’s campaigns. Woodin, too, was reluctant, but Basil O’Connor convinced him to take the post during an hour-and-a-half cab ride circling through Central Park. Like Glass, Woodin was uneasy about inflation, but he was not obsessive about it, and his personal loyalty to FDR was absolute. Like Hull, he would be easy to work with.66
When Glass decided to remain on the sidelines, Roosevelt turned to his senior senatorial colleague, Claude A. Swanson, to head the Navy Department. Swanson, dapper in frock coats and winged collars, had chaired the Naval Affairs Committee when FDR had been assistant secretary, and he shared Roosevelt’s love for the service. His appointment not only ensured that the admirals would remain in charge but cleared a Virginia Senate seat for Roosevelt’s old friend Governor Harry F. Byrd.
For the War Department, Roosevelt selected Governor George Dern of Utah. FDR was indebted to Dern for his preconvention campaigning in the West and had originally slated him for Interior. When conservationists objected, he moved Dern to War. One of the few non-Mormons to hold elective office in Utah, Dern knew little about the Army, but in those days of small budgets and international isolat
ion it seemed of little consequence.
When Dern proved unacceptable at Interior, Roosevelt turned first to Senator Hiram Johnson of California, then to his Republican colleague Bronson Cutting of New Mexico. Both declined. At the last moment Roosevelt asked Harold Ickes of Chicago, whom he did not know but who was recommended by Johnson and Cutting. Ickes had originally hoped to be appointed commissioner of Indian affairs but was elevated to the secretaryship almost by default. “Well,” Louis Howe quipped, “that’s the first break the Indians have had in a hundred years.”67
For attorney general Roosevelt went again to the Senate and named Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, who had chaired both the 1924 and 1932 Democratic conventions. Walsh had devoted much of his public life to investigating corporate malfeasance, and his appointment sent a clear signal that special interests were no longer immune. Another septuagenarian, Walsh led an active social life and suffered a fatal heart attack on March 2—two days before the inauguration—having just courted and married a much younger Cuban sugar heiress in Havana. He was replaced by Homer Cummings of Connecticut, whom FDR had planned to name governor-general of the Philippines.
For Commerce FDR had intended to appoint Jesse Straus of R. H. Macy, a position Straus’s uncle had occupied in TR’s cabinet. But old party hands like Daniels, McAdoo, and Colonel House insisted that Daniel Roper of South Carolina be given a cabinet post, and Commerce seemed the best fit. As a consolation prize, Straus drew the embassy in Paris. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., sought to be appointed secretary of agriculture, but when farm organizations objected he was posted to the Farm Board, soon to become the centerpiece of the New Deal’s Farm Credit Administration. For Agriculture, Roosevelt settled on Iowa publisher and crop experimenter Henry A. Wallace. Like Ickes, Wallace was a nominal Republican; also like Ickes, he was unknown to the president-elect before his appointment. For the final cabinet post, secretary of labor, there was no question. From the beginning FDR wanted to appoint a woman, and Frances Perkins was a shoo-in. Organized labor filed a ritual reclama, but Miss Perkins had demonstrated her ability as a member of Roosevelt’s cabinet in New York, and she was as much a part of FDR’s political family as Farley or Flynn.
As Roosevelt described it, the cabinet was “slightly to the left of center.” Three members (Hull, Swanson, and Roper) were old Wilsonians. Three were Republicans: either Republican-progressive (Ickes and Wallace) or Republican-conservative (Woodin). Two had served in the Senate (three, counting Walsh), and one (Dern) was a governor. There were two Catholics (Farley and Walsh), and for the first time a woman joined the ranks. All regions of the country were represented, and all the appointees had been FRBC—For Roosevelt Before Chicago. FDR had a fingertip feel for political nuance. He was also the most calculating and hard-nosed politician of his generation. His preconvention rivals, Al Smith and Newton D. Baker, were not consulted about, let alone appointed to, any position in the administration, nor were their supporters. The same was true of Maryland’s governor, Albert C. Ritchie. FDR’s former antagonists on the National Committee, John Raskob and Jouett Shouse, were consigned to outer darkness. Roosevelt reached out to Republican progressives and independents, but he snuffed out rivals in his own party.
FDR’s hostility was political, not personal. Baker, Raskob, Ritchie, and Smith represented the probusiness wing of the party: a conservative, hard-money tradition dating at least to the era of Grover Cleveland. Roosevelt, standing far to the left, had put together a remarkable coalition of western populists, white southerners, ethnic minorities, and big-city machines. He was not about to share the victory with his rivals nor to divert the Democratic party from the progressive path he had staked out. In 1874 Ulysses S. Grant, with his veto of the inflation bill, had weaned the Republican party from its agrarian, antislavery roots and converted it into the political vehicle of American business. In 1932 FDR broke the conservatives’ hold on the Democratic party and made it the instrument of liberal reform.
Eleanor remained at loose ends and speculated what role she might play in the new administration. “I tentatively suggested to my husband that perhaps merely being hostess at the necessary formal functions would not take all my time and he might like me to do a real job and take over some of his mail. He looked at me quizzically and said he did not think that would do; that Missy, who had been handling his mail for a long time, would feel I was interfering. I knew he was right and that it would not work,” Eleanor wrote, but FDR’s rebuff did little to improve her spirits as the inauguration approached.68
On February 4 FDR departed for an eleven-day Caribbean cruise aboard his friend Vincent Astor’s sleek 263-foot yacht, Nourmahal.69 It would be Roosevelt’s final relaxation before assuming his responsibilities as president—an escape back to the world of Groton and Harvard, of Fly Club and the Crimson. Astor, the founder and owner of Newsweek, was a Hyde Park neighbor and the nephew of FDR’s late half-brother, Rosy.* Joining them were four familiar faces from New York society pages: Kermit Roosevelt, a son of TR and the only one of the Oyster Bay clan to speak kindly of FDR; William Rhinelander Stewart, the wealthy scion of a Four Hundred family and generous contributor to Republican causes; George Baker St. George of Tuxedo Park, another wealthy Republican; and Justice Frederic Kernochan, also of Tuxedo Park, a patrician Democrat, but at least a Democrat. They were all Harvard men, shared the same exclusive clubs, traveled in the same circles, and enjoyed one another’s company. “The Hasty Pudding Club puts out to sea,” Ed Flynn joked as Nourmahal sailed from Jacksonville’s Commodore Point. Less kindly was the New York Sun:
They were just good friends with no selfish ends
To serve as they paced the decks;
There were George and Fred and the son of Ted
And Vincent (he signed the checks);
On the splendid yacht in a climate hot
To tropical seas they ran,
Among those behind they dismissed from mind
Was the well-known Forgotten Man!70
After two days at sea FDR wrote Sara that he was “getting a marvelous rest—lots of air and sun. Vincent is a dear and perfect host. George and Kermit and Freddie are excellent companions. When we land on the 15th I shall be full of health and vigor—the last holiday for many months.”71
In the early evening of February 15, Nourmahal docked at Miami and Roosevelt hurried to Bay Front Park, where he was scheduled to address the annual encampment of the American Legion. Some 20,000 legionnaires crammed the brightly lit park to greet the president-elect. Roosevelt spoke briefly, perched on top of the backseat of his open car. When he finished, he slid back into his seat and chatted amiably with Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who was standing alongside, having made the pilgrimage to Miami to eat political crow.* Suddenly, from a distance no more than forty feet away, five shots rang out in quick succession. Blood spurted from the hand of a nearby Secret Service agent, Mayor Cermak crumpled to the ground, a woman standing behind FDR was hit twice in the abdomen, and two other people were wounded. Roosevelt sat immobile and unflinching, his jaw set, ready for what might follow. He had been spared by inches. At the critical moment an alert spectator, Mrs. Lillian Cross, had hit the assassin’s arm with her handbag and spoiled his aim.72
“I heard what I thought was a firecracker; then several more,” Roosevelt wrote later.
The chauffeur started the car. I looked around and saw Mayor Cermak doubled up.… I called to the chauffeur to stop. He did—about fifteen feet from where we started. The Secret Service man shouted to him to get out of the crowd and he started forward again. I stopped him a second time [and] motioned to have [Mayor Cermak] put in the back of the car, which would be first out. He was alive but I didn’t think he was going to last. I put my left arm around him and my hand on his pulse, but I couldn’t find any pulse.… For three blocks I believed his heart had stopped. I held him all the way to the hospital and his pulse constantly improved. I remember I said: “Tony, keep quiet—don’t move. It won’t hurt if you keep quiet.”73
After the shooting Roosevelt remained at Jackson Memorial Hospital until Cermak was brought out of the emergency room. He spoke with him for several minutes and then visited the other shooting victims. About 11:15 he returned to the Nourmahal. If he had been unnerved, it did not show. “All of us were prepared, sympathetically, for any reaction that might come from Roosevelt now that the tension was over and he was alone with us,” wrote Moley.
There was nothing. Not so much as the twitching of a muscle to indicate that it wasn’t any other evening in any other place. Roosevelt was simply himself—easy, confident, poised, to all appearances unmoved.
FDR had talked to me once or twice during the campaign about the possibility that someone would try to assassinate him. But it is one thing to talk philosophically about assassination and another thing to face it. I confess that I have never in my life seen anything more magnificent than Roosevelt’s calm that night on the Nourmahal.75
Roosevelt’s matter-of-fact reaction to his brush with death, his cheerful contempt for danger, brought forth a national surge of confidence. It was abundantly clear that FDR lacked physical fear, and his courage rallied the country behind him. It provided a tonic on the eve of the inauguration; a vital pickup for a nation grappling with unprecedented unemployment, widespread hunger and need, and a banking system that teetered on the brink of collapse.
As Roosevelt’s train tracked northward, the nation was deluged with news of bank failures. Already 389 banks had shut their doors since the beginning of the year. The real panic had begun in Detroit when two of Michigan’s largest banks, Union Guardian Trust and First National, could not meet their obligations. On February 14, Governor William Comstock declared an eight-day bank holiday, freezing the funds of 900,000 customers and tying up $1.5 billion in deposits. From Michigan the panic spread like wildfire, triggering a rapid fall in stock prices and the flight of gold to Europe. On February 24, following a run on Baltimore banks, Governor Ritchie declared a three-day bank holiday. By the end of the month, banks in every section of the country were in trouble. People stood in long lines clutching satchels and paper bags, determined to take their money and stash it safely at home. Thomas W. Lamont, now chairman of J. P. Morgan, wrote Roosevelt that the situation “could not be worse.”76 Piece by piece the nation’s credit structure was falling apart.