by FDR
When Congress adjourned June 16, FDR departed for a two-week vacation sailing the New England coast. His son James had chartered a forty-five-foot schooner, Amberjack II, and the president planned to sail from Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts, around Cape Cod, four hundred miles to Campobello—his first trip to the island since he had been stricken twelve years before.27 “I am having a bang-up good time, and I do not intend to go ashore anywhere along the coast,” Roosevelt told newsmen his third day out. “This is my vacation and I am going to stay aboard this boat the whole two weeks.”28
FDR’s crew was the same that had sailed with him to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after the Democratic convention. But instead of making the trip solo, Amberjack II was accompanied by two destroyers (USS Ellis and USS Bernadou), three Coast Guard cutters, two press boats, and the Navy’s newly commissioned heavy cruiser, USS Indianapolis.* Roosevelt knew the coast thoroughly and put his small craft into places where the naval flotilla could not follow. He had no radio and for three days was stranded by heavy fog in Lakeman Bay, off the Maine coast. FDR savored every moment. He navigated through dangerously rough seas and heavy squalls that terrified the Secret Service.29 In the treacherous shoal-ridden waters off Gloucester, where more than ten thousand seamen had perished, the accompanying naval vessels plowed cautiously along behind Amberjack II, trusting FDR’s navigational judgment.30 Except for charts and a compass, Roosevelt had no navigation aids and relied on memory and intuition to know where he should go. He sailed by dead reckoning, a skill not unlike that he had recently displayed in Washington.
On the afternoon of June 29, 1933, after almost ten hours of coping with fearsome tides and currents, FDR sailed through the Lubec narrows into Passamaquoddy Bay. James hoisted the presidential pennant to the masthead, and FDR tacked effortlessly around Friar’s Head to the dock at Welchpool, on Campobello Island. As Amberjack II crossed the bow of the Indianapolis, the warship rendered honors, ship’s complement manning the rails while the guns boomed a twenty-one-gun salute. When Roosevelt was helped ashore, it marked the first time he had left the schooner since the trip had begun on June 18. He was the first American president to visit Canada while in office, and the outpouring of affection from the islanders, many of whom had known the Roosevelts for two and three generations, was overwhelming. “I was figuring this morning on the passage of time,” said FDR in his arrival remarks, “and I remembered that I was brought here because I was teething forty-nine years ago. I was thinking also, as I came through the Narrows and saw the line of fishing boats and the people on the wharves, both here at Welchpool and also at Eastport [Maine], that this reception here is probably the finest example of friendship between nations—permanent friendship between nations—that we can possibly have.”31
Roosevelt remained at Campobello four days. While there he took advantage of his absence from Washington to launch a torpedo that ultimately sank the World Monetary and Economic Conference meeting in London. At the behest of Britain and France, with reluctant U.S. support, representatives of sixty-six nations had convened in the British capital on June 20 to stabilize world currencies. FDR had studied and reflected on the matter during his cruise northward and by the time he arrived at Campobello had concluded that it was not in America’s interest to stabilize the dollar. It would be preferable for the U.S. economy to allow the dollar to float.
On the afternoon of June 30 FDR invited the newsmen who had accompanied him for a buffet lunch at the family cottage. After lunch and a few hands of bridge, the president pushed back his wheelchair and said, “I think it might be more interesting to talk for a while.” According to Charles Hurd of The New York Times, FDR “looked at his watch, and added, ‘You’ll want to go back to your dock with the tide, which gives us about an hour.’ (We were amazed that Roosevelt, then probably the busiest man in the world, could take time to keep up with the tide variations in Campobello.)”
FDR ranged over a variety of topics but soon focused on the London conference. “Etiquette forbade us to take notes,” Hurd said. “We listened.” Roosevelt made clear that while he was much in favor of international accommodation, “the United States was not going to be pushed around.” He would not agree to any pegging of the dollar that would benefit foreign countries at American expense. The newsmen—all hardened veterans who had covered the White House for years—were stunned.
“Is that for publication, Mr. President?” asked one reporter.
“No, it is off the record.… Of course, if you were simply discussing this on your own, would you not possibly reach the same conclusion?”
“Mr. President, you know very well that no one cares a whit what we think; we don’t make the policy.”
“Well, how you handle anything you write is up to you,” said FDR. “But isn’t a Campobello dateline a pretty good hedge?”32
The following day, July 1, 1933, The New York Times broke Hurd’s story on page one. Diplomatic notes dribbled back and forth across the Atlantic for the next two weeks, but for all practical purposes the London conference was dead. Raymond Moley, who had been appointed assistant secretary of state and who ramrodded American efforts in London, felt undercut by FDR and soon resigned from the administration. Secretary of State Hull, always uncomfortable with Moley as assistant secretary, shed no tear, and Roosevelt never had a second thought about torpedoing the conference. “I’m prouder of that than anything I ever did,” he told Arthur Krock in 1937.33
An equally serious foreign policy issue involved diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union. In 1933, the United States was the only major power that had not established formal relations with Moscow. The USSR had been a full participant in the London Economic Conference, it had become a vigorous trading partner for the nations of Europe, and it was abundantly clear that the Soviet regime would remain the government of Russia for the foreseeable future.
Under the Constitution the power of diplomatic recognition is entrusted exclusively to the president.* And by the fall of 1933 Roosevelt had come to the conclusion that continued nonrecognition served no useful purpose. The furor of 1920s anti-Bolshevism had subsided, American business looked favorably on increasing trade, and the traditional rivalry between Russia and Japan in the Far East made the Soviet Union a reliable buffer against Japanese expansionism. A survey of 1,139 newspapers in September indicated that fewer than 27 percent opposed recognition. “I think the menace of Bolshevism in the United States is about as great as the menace of sunstroke in Greenland or chilblains in the Sahara,” said Roy Howard, head of the Scripps-Howard chain.34
Opposition centered in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, the leadership of the AFL, and conservative patriotic groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution. FDR could safely ignore the DAR and Bill Green, but the Church required attention. Roosevelt turned on the charm. On September 4 he invited Father Edmund A. Walsh, the dean of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, to the White House for a chat. Walsh was one of the most outspoken critics of recognition, and his anti-Soviet public lectures at Washington’s Smithsonian Institution drew overflow crowds. An hour after meeting Roosevelt, Walsh told reporters he thought the president should be trusted to do what he thought was right.35
Because the career diplomats in the State Department—many of whom had spent the last fifteen years hobnobbing with White Russian émigrés—were still imbued with nostalgia for the czarist past, Roosevelt handled the negotiations himself, first through Henry Morgenthau, then through William C. Bullitt.36 Morgenthau, as head of the Farm Credit Administration, dealt with the Soviet trade organization Amtorg; Bullitt with Boris Skvirsky, the senior Russian commercial representative in the United States. As a result of these covert discussions, FDR invited Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov to Washington for direct negotiations in early November.37 The ostensible outstanding issues involved freedom of religion for Americans in Russia and the continued agitation for world revolution mounted by the Comintern. The real sticking point was
restitution of American property seized by the Soviet government in its nationalization decree of 1919.* Roosevelt and Litvinov compromised. The agreement is known as the Litvinov Assignment. The Soviet government assigned to the United States its claim to all Russian property in the United States that antedated the Revolution. The United States agreed to seize the property on behalf of the Soviet Union, thus giving effect to the Soviet nationalization decree, and use the proceeds to pay the claims of Americans whose property in Russia had been confiscated. The constitutionality of the assignment was twice challenged before the Supreme Court, but in both instances it was upheld, the “taking clause” of the Constitution notwithstanding.38†
Shortly after midnight on the morning of November 17, FDR and Litvinov signed the documents restoring diplomatic relations. At a farewell dinner for the Soviet foreign minister at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, business titans from J. P. Morgan, Chase, and other firms eager to do business with the USSR toasted the new era of recognition. Thomas Watson of IBM asked Americans to “refrain from making any criticism of the present form of government adopted by Russia.”39
Meanwhile, the National Industrial Recovery Act was having birthing problems. Enacted the last day of the session, the act established two complementary agencies: the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to coordinate economic recovery, and the Public Works Administration (PWA), authorized to spend $3.3 billion in pump-priming construction projects. NRA and PWA, as one historian has written, “were to be like two lungs, each necessary for breathing life into the moribund industrial sector.”40 But FDR made the fatal error of dividing responsibility. To head the NRA, Roosevelt brought in former brigadier general Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson, a flamboyant protégé of Bernard Baruch, renowned for his can-do military spirit and robust invective. Hard drinking and hard living, Johnson said of his appointment, “It will be red fire at first and dead cats afterward”—evidently an old Army expression.41 For PWA, the president turned to Harold Ickes. No two appointees could have been more dissimilar, and no two less likely to cooperate. For Johnson, an old cavalryman, every undertaking was a hell-for-leather charge into the face of the enemy. Ickes, on the other hand, was pathologically prudent. As he saw it, the problem of the public works program was not to spend money quickly but to spend it wisely. Obsessively tightfisted, personally examining every project in minute detail, Ickes spent a minuscule $110 million of PWA money in 1933.42
The failure of the Public Works Administration to provide economic stimulus doomed NRA’s recovery efforts from the start. Without a significant infusion of construction money, the NRA could not expand the economy. Johnson labored mightily to create industry codes that would control production, fix prices, and regulate working conditions. But without money to prime the pump, he was simply redistributing scarcity. When that became apparent, the brief spurt of popularity NRA enjoyed evaporated. Enforcing industry codes became impossible, and in early 1935 the Supreme Court administered the coup de grâce when it struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act as unconstitutional.43 Chief Justice Hughes, speaking for a unanimous Court, held that the code-making authority given to the president constituted an impermissible delegation of legislative authority to the executive branch. In a concurring opinion, Justice Benjamin Cardozo, normally in sympathy with the New Deal, called the NIRA “delegation running riot.”44 FDR soon castigated the horse-and-buggy mentality of the Court, and its decision to overturn the NIRA later contributed to his desire to restructure the judicial branch.45 But the day the decision came down, Roosevelt was relieved.* The Court had bailed him out of a program that was increasingly unpopular and unsuccessful. “You know the whole thing has been a mess,” FDR told Frances Perkins.
“It has been an awful headache,” said Roosevelt. “Some of the things they have done in NRA are pretty wrong.… I don’t want to impose a system on this country that will set aside the anti-trust laws on any permanent basis. So let’s give the NRA a certain amount of time to liquidate. Have a history of it written, and then it will be over.”46
As the winter of 1933–34 approached, Roosevelt recognized that Ickes’s caution in spending PWA money was creating few jobs and doing little to ease the suffering of the destitute. Faced with the critical need to tide people over the winter, FDR turned to Hopkins. Could he provide temporary jobs for 4 million people? Hopkins said he could if he had the money. Roosevelt mentally computed the cost—he assumed it would require an additional $400 million—and decided to tap Ickes’s underused Public Works budget for the funds. He delegated Hopkins, Frances Perkins, and Henry Wallace to break the news to Ickes and on November 9, 1933, issued an executive order establishing the Civil Works Administration with Hopkins as director.47
As Roosevelt anticipated, Hopkins moved quickly. He shifted staff from FERA to the CWA, raided Army warehouses for tools and equipment, and dragooned the Veterans Administration—the one federal agency with a national disbursement system in place—into becoming the CWA’s paymaster.48 Unlike relief programs, the Civil Works Administration provided jobs. Within ten days Hopkins had put more than 800,000 people to work, 2.6 million by mid-December, and by early January he was well over the 4 million mark. The CWA paid the prevailing minimum wage for unskilled labor, and the work was seasonal. When it went out of existence in April 1934, the CWA had pumped close to $1 billion into the ailing economy. Eighty percent of that had gone directly into workers’ wages, with the bulk of the remainder paid out for equipment and material.49 Less than 2 percent went for administrative overhead— another Hopkins hallmark.
In the bitter winter of 1933–34, with record low temperatures gripping the nation, the CWA laid 12 million feet of sewer pipe and built or upgraded 500,000 miles of secondary roads, 40,000 schools, 3,700 recreation areas, and nearly a thousand airports. It employed 50,000 teachers to keep rural schools open and to provide adult education in the cities. It hired 3,000 artists and writers—and they worked as artists and writers. “Hell,” said Hopkins, “they’ve got to eat like other people.”50 The CWA did more than provide an overdue cash infusion to the economy; it restored a nation’s self-respect. “We aren’t on relief any more,” said a proud woman in Iowa. “My husband is working for the government.”51
Lieutenant Colonel John C. H. Lee, detailed by the Army to study the CWA, watched with astonishment as Hopkins put people to work in every county and every town in the country in less than two months. In World War I it had taken the Army a year and a half to muster as many men, said Lee, and, unlike the Army, Hopkins paid his people weekly. Lee, whose personal style ran heavily along authoritarian lines,* expressed unaccustomed admiration for Hopkins’s informality with his youthful staff. “These assistants address Mr. Hopkins fondly as ‘Harry.’ There is no rigidity or formality, yet he holds their respect, confidence and whole-souled cooperation.”52
The second session of the Seventy-third Congress convened on January 3, 1934. FDR was still the quarterback calling plays, but the opposition had begun to coalesce. Republicans were recovering from their postelection shell shock, and in the Democratic party both the far left and the extreme right were in incipient revolt. Roosevelt held the high ground, and at his recommendation Congress enacted legislation establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the investment industry and the Federal Communications Commission to control the airwaves.53 But the majorities behind the bills were smaller, and in the case of the SEC, passage required the president’s personal intervention.† Congress also enacted the Railroad Retirement Act to provide mandatory pension coverage in the rail industry and agreed to fix the price of gold at $35 an ounce.54 After allowing the dollar to float for a year, Roosevelt decided to devalue it permanently at 59 percent of its previous worth.55 When the Seventy-third Congress adjourned sine die on June 18, FDR wrote Speaker Rainey, “It’s been a grand session—the best in all our history.”56
Two weeks later, Roosevelt went to the people. In his first fireside chat of 1934, FDR asked Americans
to judge the progress of recovery for themselves. “Are you better off today than you were last year? Are your debts less burdensome? Is your bank account more secure?” Roosevelt mocked “the Doubting Thomases” who decried the loss of liberty. “Answer this question also out of the facts of your own life. Have you lost any of your rights or liberty or constitutional freedom of action and choice?” It was a powerful performance—as powerful as any speech Roosevelt had given.57
On July 1, 1934, the president boarded the USS Houston, a sister ship of the Indianapolis, for a 14,000-mile trip to the Hawaiian Islands via the Panama Canal—his favorite form of relaxation. The second session of the Seventy-third Congress had not been the bed of roses FDR’s letter to Rainey suggested. Roosevelt’s rivals for control of the party did not take their exclusion lightly. “It is difficult today,” wrote the conservative pundit Frank Kent, “to name any outstanding Democratic leader of the pre–New Deal period who is in sympathy with the Roosevelt policy.”58 Passage of the Securities Exchange Act confirmed the schism. Al Smith, John W. Davis, Newton D. Baker, and the remnants of the Raskob-Shouse organization joined ranks in an attempt to return the party to its pre-Roosevelt, probusiness moorings. “Who is Ickes?” asked Al Smith rhetorically. “Who is Hopkins? And in the name of all that’s holy, who is Tugwell? Is La Guardia a Democrat?* If he is, then I am a Chinaman with a haircut.”59
In August 1934, with generous financial backing from the du Ponts, General Motors, Sun Oil, and Montgomery Ward, the dissidents formed the American Liberty League, with Jouett Shouse as president. The League’s avowed objectives were to teach respect for the rights of property and require government to encourage private enterprise. Asked about the formation of the League at his press conference shortly afterward, Roosevelt was withering: “When you define American principles you want to go whole hog. An organization that only advocates two or three out of the Ten Commandments may be a perfectly good organization, but it would have certain shortcomings in having failed to advocate the other seven or eight.”60 To William Bullitt, now the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, FDR wrote, “All the big guns have started shooting. Their organization has already been labeled the ‘I Can’t Take It Club.’ ”61
