by FDR
When the campaign began in earnest on Labor Day, FDR left nothing to chance. He whistle-stopped across the country, delivering more than two hundred speeches in sixty days.* Roosevelt concentrated on the heartland. He was confident of carrying the Solid South and the big cities of the North but was determined to deny the farm belt to Landon and Lemke. He spent three days in Iowa, two in the Dakotas, two each in Nebraska and Wyoming, two in Colorado, and two in Kansas. Roosevelt spoke seven times in Landon’s home state before moving on to Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio.43 Wherever he went, jubilant crowds reached out to touch him. They waved and cheered and shouted thanks for saving a farm or getting a factory reopened. Even the weather cooperated. Rain began to fall on the parched Middle West as Roosevelt moved through. The president never mentioned his opponent by name. He touted the accomplishments of the New Deal, contrasted the do-nothing years of Herbert Hoover, and did not let his audiences forget the opposition of the “economic royalists” of the Liberty League.44
Roosevelt was a natural on the campaign trail because he enjoyed it. “He rode for hours in the 1936 campaign in motor processions, waving constantly to people along the roadsides, shaking hands with hundreds, and delivering often ten to fifteen speeches a day,” said Farley. “He never gave the impression of working hard; on the contrary he was stimulated and exhilarated.”45 Who else would join with an American Legion chorus in Syracuse to sing “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag” or playfully invite hostile editors to the platform as FDR did with William Allen White in Emporia, Kansas?
The only glitch in the Democratic campaign came early on, when Farley, addressing a gathering of party faithful in Michigan, referred to Landon as the governor of “a typical prairie state.”
“Never use the word ‘typical,’ ” chided FDR. “If the sentence had read, ‘One of those splendid Prairie States’, no one could have picked up on it. But the word ‘typical’ coming from a New Yorker is meat for the opposition.”46
Landon recognized he had an uphill fight. He waged a low-key campaign, showed the Republican colors to advantage, and remained on good terms with FDR.† That was shrewd politics. Landon’s advisers calculated that rabid Roosevelt haters would vote Republican in any case and the campaign should aim at the ordinary citizen who liked the New Deal’s goals but disapproved of its methods. “None of my campaign speeches will be merely an attack upon the opposition,” Landon wrote Idaho’s senator William E. Borah in August. “I cannot criticize everything that has been done in the past three years and do it sincerely. Neither do I believe that such an attack is good politics.”47
If Landon took the high road, Gerald L. K. Smith, Father Coughlin, and the Union party took the low. Alarmed at Lemke’s failure to gain traction, Union party rhetoric escalated to a level of vituperation seldom seen in American public life. “I’ll teach them how to hate,” Smith boasted. “Religion and patriotism, keep going on that. It’s the only way you can get them really ‘het up.’ ”48 For Coughlin, teaching how to hate came naturally. Determined to outdo Smith, Coughlin not only attacked FDR as a liar, a double-crosser, and a Communist but placed much of the blame on the Jewish advisers who surrounded him. Called to task by the Church, Coughlin apologized for calling Roosevelt a liar but was soon at it again. In New York he declared the difference between Roosevelt and Landon a choice “between carbolic acid and rat poison.” In New Bedford, he called Roosevelt “the dumbest man ever to occupy the White House.” In Cincinnati on September 25 he described FDR as the “anti-God” and implied that bullets would be permissible to dispose of an “upstart dictator in the United States … when the ballot is useless.”49
With that remark Coughlin stepped over the line. The Vatican summoned Coughlin’s bishop, Michael Gallagher, to Rome; L’Osservatore Romano accused Coughlin of provoking disrespect for authority; and, at the apparent suggestion of George Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago, a not-so-covert supporter of FDR, the papal secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII), embarked on a two-month vacation in the United States and remained through the election.*
Roosevelt closed the campaign with a massive rally at Madison Square Garden on October 31. With the wind in his sails and well ahead in all opinion polls save one,* FDR all but proclaimed victory. “I prefer to remember this campaign not as bitter but as hard-fought. There should be no bitterness or hate where the sole thought is the welfare of the United States of America. No man can occupy the office of President without realizing that he is President of all the people.”
That said, Roosevelt did not disappoint the partisan crowd. After vigorously defending Social Security—“Only desperate men with their backs to the wall would descend so far below the level of decent citizenship” to suggest that the funds collected from workers would not be available when they retired—the president recited a litany of Republican abuse:
For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The nation looked to Government but Government looked away.
Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years with the scourge!
Nine mocking years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines!
Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair!
The applause, reported The New York Times, came in “roars which rose and fell like the sound of waves pounding in the surf.”50 FDR savored every moment. “Powerful influences,” he continued, “strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that Government is best which is most indifferent. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
Absolute pandemonium. The vast audience in the Garden rose and cheered and then cheered some more. Roosevelt lowered his voice. “I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match.” More sustained cheering and applause, then: “I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.”51
ON MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2, the day before the election, Farley provided Roosevelt a detailed assessment of the party’s chances. New Hampshire and Connecticut would be close. Also Michigan and Kansas. But he thought FDR would carry them. “I am still definitely of the opinion that you will carry every state but two—Maine and Vermont.”52 Since Maine had already voted, that meant a virtual clean sweep on election day.*
Roosevelt was incredulous. Participating as he always did in a preelection poll among the newsmen who covered his campaign, FDR put his electoral vote total at 360 to Landon’s 171. That was about two thirds the number Farley had given him. As the early returns came in Tuesday night, Roosevelt continued to be skeptical. When New Haven was reported to have gone Democratic by 15,000 votes, the president said it must be a mistake. “It couldn’t be that large.” He asked Missy to have the figures checked. She was back in two minutes. The figures were accurate. Roosevelt leaned back in his chair, blew a smoke ring in the air, and said, “Wow!” Farley had been right.53
When the ballots were tabulated, Roosevelt had won an unprecedented 60.79 percent of the popular vote.† He beat Landon 27,747,636 to 16,679,543—a margin 4 million votes larger than the Democratic landslide in 1932. Lemke polled a mere 892,492 votes nationwide, and Norman Thomas, running under the Socialist banner for the third time, received 187,785.54 That was 700,000 votes fewer than Thomas had received in 1932. The Socialist program was indeed being carried out by the New Deal, quipped Thomas: “On a stretcher.”55 In the electoral college, Roosevelt won forty-six states with 523 votes to Landon’s 8—a majority not seen since James Monroe cruised to an all-but-unanimous victory during the Era of Good Feelings in 1820.56
Roosevelt’s confidence about the one-party South proved out. He carried South Carolina with 98.6 percent of the vote, Mississippi with 98.0, and Georgia with 87.1. “Who are the fourteen
persons who voted against you in Warm Springs?” asked Farley. “You ought to raise hell with them.”57 Roosevelt’s top-heavy majority in Congress increased further. In the House, the Democrats gained eleven additional seats, giving them a 331–89 majority. In the Senate, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 76–16, with four independents who were solidly behind the president: Henrik Shipstead and Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, and George Norris of Nebraska. Norris had represented Nebraska in the Senate since 1913 but because of his support for the New Deal had been denied the GOP nomination in 1936 and was running as an independent. Roosevelt was particularly concerned about Norris, and the last thing he did before going to bed election night was to call Nebraska to inquire about the Senate race. “Of all the results on November third,” he wrote Norris later, “your re-election gave me the greatest happiness.”58
The 1936 election marked the birth of the Roosevelt coalition—a unique alliance of big-city bosses, the white South, farmers and workers, Jews and Irish Catholics, ethnic minorities, and African Americans that would dominate American politics for the next generation. Gone from the Democratic party was the old hard-money, probusiness crowd: men like John Raskob and Jouett Shouse; John W. Davis and Newton D. Baker; and the checkbooks of the du Ponts and General Motors. In their stead were organized labor, led by John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman; disaffected businessmen like A. P. Giannini of the Bank of America, who feuded with the financial establishment; and leaders of new industries, typified by Thomas Watson of IBM. Lewis, a lifelong Republican who had supported Hoover in 1932, marshaled the battalions of the CIO behind Roosevelt and contributed $770,000 (roughly $10 million currently) to the president’s campaign.59 Labor’s votes helped swing Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana behind FDR. Pennsylvania went Democratic for the first time since James Buchanan. African Americans deserted the party of Lincoln; for the first time since Emancipation, blacks voted Democratic.60 Not because FDR was in the forefront of the fight for civil rights. He was not. But no segment of American society had suffered more severely from the Depression, and the New Deal provided relief.
Roosevelt made no changes in his administration for the second term. Hull remained at State, Morgenthau at the Treasury, and Homer Cummings continued as attorney general. Frances Perkins, Harold Ickes, and Henry Wallace, the three most ardent New Dealers, stayed at their posts, as did Daniel Roper at Commerce and the elderly Claude Swanson at Navy. James Farley continued to wear two hats—postmaster general and party chairman—and at the War Department former Kansas governor Harry Woodring had succeeded George Dern, who had died in August.* In the White House, Louis Howe was gone, but otherwise FDR’s personal staff, essentially an extended family, remained intact. Missy and Grace Tully ran the office seamlessly; Hackmeister handled the phones; Pa Watson, Steve Early, and Marvin McIntyre did the president’s bidding; and Admiral Ross McIntire looked after his health. On Capitol Hill, Joe Robinson of Arkansas continued as Senate majority leader, William Bankhead of Alabama was now speaker, and Sam Rayburn had become House majority leader. The chairmen of the principal committees in both houses—from Appropriations to Ways and Means—once again were uniformly from the South.
Across the Capitol grounds to the east, the Supreme Court reflected similar continuity. The Court’s membership had not changed since Oliver Wendell Holmes had stepped down five years earlier. Willis Van Devanter, the senior justice, had been appointed by William Howard Taft in 1910. Two justices, James McReynolds and Louis Brandeis, had been appointed by Wilson. Harding had appointed two, Coolidge one, and Hoover three.† Brandeis, the oldest, was eighty. Five were in their seventies, and Owen Roberts, the youngest, was sixty-one. FDR was the first president since James Monroe (1817–21) to serve four years without making a single appointment to the Court.
Roosevelt was inaugurated on January 20, 1937—the first president to take office under the Twentieth Amendment. The weather was abysmal. An unforgiving January rain pummeled the stands and parade route. Capitol Plaza appeared roofed with umbrellas as more than 40,000 people gathered to watch the ceremony. The inaugural platform was fully open to the storm. Rain swept across the plaza, splattered against the president’s winged collar, trickled down his bare head, and blotted his speech. Twice FDR paused during his address to brush water from his face.
With an unprecedented popular mandate, Roosevelt was on the offensive from the beginning. His inaugural address was a call to battle on behalf of those still denied the fruits of the American dream:
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.
I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.
I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children.
I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions.
I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.61
When the ceremony concluded, Roosevelt ordered an open car. Eleanor joined him, and the two rode slowly back to the White House, waving to the rain-soaked spectators who lined the route. Mrs. Roosevelt’s inaugural dress and hat were ruined, her fur coat sopping wet. FDR looked as though he had fallen into a swimming pool with his clothes on. At the end of the fifteen-minute ride the Roosevelts changed clothes hastily to watch the inaugural parade, again from a replica of Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. That too, at FDR’s insistence, was open to the weather.62
· · ·
ROOSEVELT DID NOT mention the Supreme Court in his inaugural address. But with Congress cooperative and Democrats or independents in control of forty-two of the nation’s governor’s mansions, he now took on the Court.63 As a lawyer he should have known better; as a politician he should have been more cautious; as president he should have had a firmer grasp of the constitutional separation of powers.
Since 1933 the Supreme Court had declared six pieces of New Deal legislation unconstitutional.* It had denied the president the authority to remove members of independent regulatory commissions64 and in June 1936 had struck down New York State’s minimum-wage law for women and children.65 Four of these decisions had been unanimous or almost so.66
At the same time the Court had upheld emergency legislation in Minnesota declaring a mortgage moratorium and had validated similar Depression-based legislation in New York fixing the price of milk.67 It upheld Congress’s authority to abrogate the gold clauses in private contracts,68 sustained the Tennessee Valley Authority’s right to sell electric power,69 and on December 21, 1936, a month before FDR’s inaugural, upheld the broad power of the president to conduct foreign relations: “In this vast external realm, with its important, complicated, delicate and manifold problems, the President alone has the power to speak or listen as a representative of the nation.”70
The problem in 1937 was not the Court but the law, compounded by the hasty drafting of early New Deal legislation. Both the NIRA and the Frazier-Lemke Farm Mortgage Act (and to a lesser extent the Agricultural Adjustment Act) were loosely drawn and excessively broad, and made little effort to navigate the shoals of constitutional precedent. Conventional wisdom considers the 1930s Supreme Court hidebound and reactionary. Yet under Hughes’s effective leadership the Court had become the nation’s principal protector of civil liberties. It had reversed a hundred years of precedent to hold the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press applicable to the states;71 it had overturned the rape convictions of nine young black men in Scottsboro, Alabama, and made the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel applicable to the states in capital cases.72 When the young men were tried again and convicted by an all-white jury, a unanimous Court overturned that conviction as well.73 The Hughes Court declared California’s statute making it unlawful to fly a red flag an unconstituti
onal denial of free speech.74 And in an equally important decision rendered on January 7, 1937, the justices unanimously reversed the conviction of a Communist activist in Oregon for organizing a political meeting and distributing party literature. “Peaceable assembly for lawful discussion cannot be made a crime,” said Hughes for the Court.75 Each of these decisions was a milestone in the growth of American civil liberty, and the Supreme Court was in the forefront of that growth.
This was not a reactionary Court.76 But the constitutional law of the last forty years was stacked against the New Deal, and the Roosevelt administration had been cavalier in its approach to the problem. When the early legislation was struck down, it came as no surprise to most informed observers. What was surprising was that FDR chose to attack the Court and not the law: that he zeroed in on the elderly justices and not the questionable precedents they were adhering to.*
Roosevelt plotted his attack in secret. That was a tactical error. Military commanders going into battle take care to conceal their plans, but they are not dealing with Congress and the Court. For four years Roosevelt had handled Congress masterfully. On every piece of New Deal legislation he worked closely with the members involved: cajoling, co-opting, listening to their contributions. His failure to consult when it came to the Supreme Court—his refusal to include the congressional leadership in the planning stages of his proposal to alter the Court’s membership—denied him the support he needed when opposition crystallized.
The genesis of FDR’s Court-packing plan traces to a meeting in the Oval Office in January 1935 when the “Gold Clause Cases” were before the Court. Anticipating that the justices might rule against the government, Roosevelt asked what could be done should that occur. Robert H. Jackson, then the general counsel of the Treasury’s revenue arm, mentioned that when the “Legal Tender Cases” had been pending in 1870, President Grant had appointed two additional justices, causing the Court to reverse itself and validate the greenbacks that had been circulating since the Civil War.* Roosevelt was intrigued and instructed Attorney General Cummings to look into the matter.77 He emphasized to Cummings the need to be discreet. For the next two years Cummings, Solicitor General Stanley Reed, and two of Cummings’s assistants reviewed precedent and laid plans. No one on the White House staff was informed. Except for Cummings, no one in the cabinet knew what was afoot. None of FDR’s advisers, men like Sam Rosenman, Felix Frankfurter, Tommy Corcoran, and Ben Cohen, were made privy. And Congress was kept in the dark.78
