Jean Edward Smith

by FDR

  Roosevelt was as surprised as anyone but refused to use force against the strikers. As he told Frances Perkins, “Well, it is illegal, but what law are they breaking? The law of trespass, and that is about the only law that could be invoked. And what do you do when a man trespasses on your property? You can order him off. You can get the sheriff to order him off.… But shooting it out and killing a lot of people because they have violated the law of trespass somehow offends me. I just don’t see that as the answer. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Why can’t these fellows in General Motors meet with the committee of workers? Talk it out. It wouldn’t be so terrible.”13

  Michigan governor Frank Murphy saw it the same way. “I’m not going down in history as Bloody Murphy,” he told a friend. “If I send soldiers in on the [strikers] there’d be no telling how many would be killed.”14 Murphy also authorized state relief payments for the families of the strikers. When Garner pressed FDR about Murphy’s refusal to take action, Roosevelt held his ground. “It was the hottest argument we ever had,” said Garner.15

  With the strike in its seventh week and with both federal and state authorities unwilling to use force, General Motors looked for a way out. Chrysler and Ford had boosted production to take advantage of GM’s shutdown, and Walter Chrysler had stolen the march by recognizing the United Auto Workers. “Leave General Motors guessing again,” he told Labor secretary Perkins.16

  At Frances Perkins’s suggestion, FDR picked up the phone and called William Knudsen, the president of General Motors. A call from the White House, she said, would give Knudsen an excuse if he wanted to settle. Roosevelt had never met Knudsen but agreed to the gambit and laid on the charm: “Is that you, Bill?” he asked.

  “I know you’ve been through a lot, Bill, and I want to tell you that I feel sorry for you, but Miss Perkins has told me about the situation you are discussing and I have just called up to say I hope very much that you will go through with this and that your people will meet with the [workers’] committee.”17

  With FDR’s encouragement General Motors recognized the United Auto Workers as labor’s bargaining agent at its sixty factories in fourteen states. Other issues remained unresolved, but the central point had been won: General Motors recognized the union.

  Big Steel followed close behind. The United States Steel Corporation (“Big Steel”), with 220,000 employees, produced more steel annually than Germany, the world’s second largest steel-producing country.18 For fifty years U.S. Steel and its predecessors had militantly resisted unionization. The Homestead massacre of 1892, in which ten Pennsylvania steelworkers were killed, was emblematic of the violence that beset the industry. The lesson of the General Motors strike at Flint was not lost on Big Steel. Anxious to avoid a repeat, Myron C. Taylor, the firm’s chairman, and John L. Lewis quickly came to an agreement that not only recognized the steelworkers’ union but granted a pay hike, a forty-hour workweek, and time and a half for overtime.

  Lewis and the leaders of organized labor assumed “Little Steel” (Bethlehem, Republic, Youngstown, and the small firms throughout the country) would fall into line. But Tom Girdler, the gruff, union-busting head of Republic Steel, decided otherwise. Led by Girdler, Little Steel fought a determined rearguard action against unionization. The worst violence in modern labor history erupted on Memorial Day 1937, when South Chicago police opened fire on marchers at the Republic steel works, killing ten and wounding thirty others, including a woman and three children. Violence spread quickly. Two steelworkers were shot and killed in Youngstown, Ohio, on June 19, three in Massillon, eighteen in all during the summer of 1937, and Little Steel refused to budge. Emboldened by Girdler’s example, International Harvester, Westinghouse, Maytag, Allis-Chalmers, and the Big Four meatpackers refused to bargain with labor. Ford held out until 1941.

  Much of public opinion soured on union tactics. When the organizational drive began, the majority of Americans were sympathetic. But the wave of violence that accompanied labor’s rising militancy caused many to draw back. Middle-class businessmen and professionals in particular were terrified by the sit-ins and demanded that government take action. A nonbinding Congressional resolution that declared the sit-down strike illegal cleared the Senate 75–3.19 Roosevelt was caught in the middle. Asked at his press conference on June 29 to comment on the fight between Little Steel and the CIO, the president repeated Mercutio’s line in Romeo and Juliet: “A plague on both your houses.”20 FDR’s refusal to provide support drove John L. Lewis off the New Deal reservation: “It ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table … to curse with equal fervor … both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.”21 At the same time Lewis was castigating the administration, Roosevelt’s refusal to take sides alienated those who believed the president was implicitly condoning sit-down strikes and the accompanying assaults on private property. FDR could not win. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

  Labor unrest contributed to the economy’s sudden collapse in 1937. But it was FDR’s misplaced decision to reduce federal spending that triggered the crisis. In the spring of 1937 American production pulled above pre-Depression levels for the first time. The New York Times’ Weekly Business Index reported output at 110—10 percent higher than in the corresponding week in 1929. Payrolls showed solid gains, and the steel industry was working at 80 percent of capacity. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had stood at 34 in 1933, had risen almost sixfold, to 190. Unemployment shrank to 12 percent, barely a third of the March 1933 percentage. Subtract the young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps together with those at work in the job creation programs of the PWA and WPA, and the unemployment figure stood at 4 percent.22*

  In June 1937 Roosevelt assumed that the economic battle had been won and slashed spending drastically. WPA activities were sharply reduced, farm subsidies curtailed, and public works pump priming eliminated. At the same time, Washington siphoned off some $2 billion in purchasing power in new Social Security taxes, and the Federal Reserve Board raised its reserve requirements for member banks by 50 percent, further reducing liquidity. FDR, a thrifty Dutchman at heart, believed it was time to balance the budget. The federal deficit for 1936 had been $4.3 billion. Roosevelt’s 1937 budget reduced that figure to $2.7 billion. Spending projections for 1938 showed the deficit at a mere $740 million, and by fiscal 1939 the budget would be balanced.23

  Such massive contraction was more than the recovering economy could sustain. On October 19 the New York Stock Exchange suffered its worst day since 1929. Waves of selling hit the market, pushing stocks to new lows. By the end of October the Dow Jones stood at 115, down 40 percent from its August high. Industrial activity declined more abruptly than at any other time in the nation’s history. By the end of 1937 steel production was down to 19 percent of capacity. The New York Times’ Business Index plunged to 85, wiping out all of the gains since 1935. Nightclubs and restaurants in New York failed; new autos clogged showrooms; gold fled the country.24 Between Labor Day and Christmas, more than 2 million people lost their jobs, and another 2 million in the first three months of 1938. If the rate of decline continued through the year, the United States would lose almost two thirds of the gains since 1933.25

  The “depression within a depression” precipitated a sharp split within the administration. Morgenthau, Farley, and Commerce secretary Dan Roper urged FDR to stay the course, balance the budget, and adopt a more conciliatory stance toward business. As Morgenthau put it, the time had come “to strip off the bandages, throw away the crutches” and let the economy see if “it could stand on its own feet.”26 Opposed were Hopkins, Ickes, Perkins, and Wallace, aided by Marriner Eccles of the Federal Reserve, who urged vigorous resumption of government spending. The downturn had occurred when federal expenditures had been reduced; it figured that a sharp increase in spending would reverse the momentum.

  Just as in the struggle between the CIO and Little Steel, Roosevelt was caught in the middle. “It is clear that
he is greatly disturbed … and doesn’t know which way to turn,” wrote Ickes after a cabinet meeting on November 6, 1937. “He is plainly worried.”27

  Like Hoover in 1930, Roosevelt temporized. “Everything will work out all right if we just sit tight and keep quiet.”28 When Congress reconvened in January 1938, FDR did not mention the economic downturn. “As I see it,” said Morgenthau, “you are just treading water.”29

  “Absolutely,” said Roosevelt, who was always flippant when confronted with economic issues he did not fully comprehend. As James MacGregor Burns expressed it, “Roosevelt’s deficiencies as an economist were as striking as his triumphs as a politician.”30

  “The old Roosevelt magic has lost its kick,” chortled Hugh Johnson to the National Press Club. “The diverse elements in his Falstaffian army can no longer be kept together and led by a melodious whinny and a winning smile.”31

  Meanwhile, the economy continued to deteriorate. On March 25, 1938, the stock market broke again, and virtually every economic index continued south. The price of farm products, which had held up well through 1937, joined the rout. Roosevelt was bailed out of his indecision by Harry Hopkins, who descended on the vacationing president at Warm Springs on April 2, armed with specific proposals for a massive spending program. Stung by continued press reference to the “Roosevelt recession,” FDR reluctantly jettisoned the balanced budget approach. “They have stampeded him,” Morgenthau lamented to aides at Treasury. “They have stampeded him just like cattle.”32

  On April 14 Roosevelt asked Congress for a special appropriation of $3.4 billion to revive the flagging economy. Hopkins would receive a $1.4 billion infusion for the WPA; Ickes, whose PWA had been liquidated some months before, would receive $1 billion for public works; and additional sums were allocated for slum clearance and low-cost housing, farm subsidies, and a small naval construction program. By the end of 1938 the United States had regained half the lost ground. Employment rose by 2 million, factory payrolls by 26 percent, and steel production by 127 percent. The downturn had been induced by the cutback in government spending FDR had ordered, and the recovery was delayed by his procrastination. When Roosevelt sought to pack the Supreme Court, he shot himself in the foot. When he prematurely curtailed federal spending in 1937, he shot the country in the foot.

  Into FDR’s sea of troubles Senator Robert Wagner introduced antilynching legislation that was certain to create havoc in what remained of the New Deal coalition in Congress. James Byrnes called it “a bill to destroy the Democratic party.”33 Richard Russell of Georgia said it was a piece of legislation designed “to lynch the last remaining evidence of States’ rights and sovereignty.”34 As southern senators rose in opposition, Roosevelt ran for cover.

  The lynching of African Americans by white southerners, if not a way of life, occurred with such disturbing frequency as to stain the fabric of the nation. Since 1933, eighty-three blacks—roughly seventeen a year—had been viciously put to death in the South. Lynchings were not merely public hangings but community ceremonies where frenzied men, women, and children inflicted unspeakable cruelty on their helpless victims—a shocking reversion to primitive brutality.35

  To satisfy states’ rights concerns, the Wagner bill did not make lynching a federal crime but would hold local law enforcement officials accountable. If a lynching went unprosecuted for thirty days, federal authorities could intervene and bring charges against the local officials responsible for the delay. Fines ranged up to $5,000 with possible imprisonment for five years.36 Except for racist peckerwoods like Mississippi’s Theodore G. Bilbo, most southerners on Capitol Hill shared the nation’s shame and deplored the depravity lynchings entailed. For them the issue turned on states’ rights and the intrusion, even if one step removed, of federal law enforcement in what was seen as a purely local matter. Shades of Reconstruction colored that view—a festering memory kept alive by a steady stream of popular and scholarly writing, abetted by films such as D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.* White supremacy went to the core of the issue, and no Washington incumbent from below the Mason-Dixon Line wanted to be “outniggered” in a Democratic primary.

  Wagner had initially introduced his bill in January 1934, but the rush of New Deal legislation prevented it from being considered. In 1935 the threat of a southern filibuster kept it off the floor. Nineteen thirty-six was an election year, and the last thing Democrats wanted was a split in party ranks before November. When the Seventy-fifth Congress convened in January 1937, the bill seemed to have a fighting chance. Aside from unprecedented Democratic majorities in both houses (including many new members from outside the South), recent Gallup polls suggested that more than 70 percent of the public favored an antilynching law. Southerners were 65 to 35 percent in favor.37 A ghastly double lynching in Duck Hill, Mississippi, in April in which two handcuffed black prisoners were chained to a tree, mutilated with blowtorches, doused with gasoline, and set afire underscored the urgency of the legislation. In the House, the southern leadership kept the bill buried in committee but a discharge petition (signed by 218 members) brought it to the floor, and on April 15 the bill passed 277–120, Speaker Bankhead and Majority Leader Rayburn voting against. In the Senate, the Judiciary Committee reported the bill favorably in June, too late for consideration at that session but at the top of the agenda come January.

  Roosevelt stayed on the sidelines. “I did not choose the tools with which I must work,” he told Walter White, the secretary of the National Association for Advancement of Colored People. “Had I been permitted to choose them I would have selected quite different ones. But I’ve got to get legislation passed to save America. The Southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places in most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass.… I just can’t take that risk.”38*

  At his press conference in October 1934, FDR declined to endorse Wagner’s bill.39 In 1935, when the bill faced a Senate filibuster, he refused to comment.40 When Eleanor was invited to address an NAACP protest rally, Roosevelt counseled caution. “President says this is dynamite,” wrote Missy in longhand in the margin of the invitation. Eleanor did not go.41 In 1935 ER was invited to attend the closing session of the twenty-sixth annual convention of the NAACP in St. Louis. “FDR should I go?” she asked. Missy replied for the president that it would be best if she did not.42 In private conversation FDR said he thought the antilynching bill was unconstitutional,† but the fact is he did not want to endanger what remained of his ties to the white South—especially to the southern oligarchs who controlled Congress.

  Senator Wagner’s bill came before the Senate on January 6, 1938. For the next six weeks the upper chamber was immobilized, snarled in a southern filibuster, senators spelling one another round the clock. Twice Wagner moved for cloture to end the debate, and twice he was defeated. Roosevelt kept his hands off. At his press conference on January 14 he was asked whether he favored the bill. “I have not referred to it at all,” said FDR. “I should say there was enough discussion going on in the Senate.”43 If Roosevelt had intervened decisively—perhaps if he had simply offered a word of encouragement—cloture could have been obtained and the bill passed. Yet he declined. To some it looked as if the filibuster had White House sanction. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP charged that there was a gentleman’s agreement to let the bill be talked to death. Most senators really did not want antilynching legislation “but would have to vote for it if it came up.”44 On February 21, 1938, Senator Wagner withdrew the bill so the Senate could move on. In 1939, when the Seventy-sixth Congress convened, the bill was introduced again but failed to make it to the floor in either chamber. In 1940 it passed the House but was not taken up by the Senate. Then came the war.*

  During the twelve years FDR was president not one piece of civil rights legislation became law. No federal effort was made to abolish the white primary in the South or overturn the poll tax.45 R
oosevelt’s closest aides—Stephen Early, Marvin McIntyre, and Pa Watson—were southerners who shared the prejudice of the times. To the best of their ability they smothered controversial issues that might offend voters in the South. No effort was made to use the bully pulpit of the White House to advance the cause of racial justice.

  That does not mean the Roosevelt administration was insensitive to the needs of African Americans. The segregation of government employees introduced by Woodrow Wilson was quietly set aside; blacks were employed in increasing numbers and at significantly higher levels of federal service— including the appointment of William H. Hastie as district judge for the Virgin Islands, the first African American to sit on the federal bench.46

  But it was at the symbolic level where the greatest strides were taken, and they were taken by Mrs. Roosevelt, not the president. When ER rose to fetch a glass of water for Mary McLeod Bethune, history was made.† When Eleanor demonstratively placed her chair in the aisle between the white and black sections at a segregated conference in Birmingham, she rallied the spirits of African Americans throughout the country. “You would have to have lived in that era to know what kind of impact this had,” recalled the civil rights activist Pauli Murray.47 When ER resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution to protest their refusal to allow world-famous contralto Marian Anderson to sing at Washington’s Constitution Hall, shock waves echoed through the country.

  No incident did more to advance the cause of racial tolerance than the concert Marian Anderson performed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939. When the DAR refused to make Constitution Hall available, Sol Hurok, Miss Anderson’s manager, conceived the idea of an open-air concert at the shrine of the Great Emancipator. Secretary Ickes signed on, and FDR gave his approval. “Tell Oscar [Chapman, assistant secretary of the interior] he has my permission to have Marian sing from the top of the Washington Monument if he wants it.”48 The Roosevelts were in Hyde Park that Sunday, but an integrated throng that stretched as far as the eye could see gathered to hear the great artist. Washington’s Afro-American called it “one of those rare occasions when caste is forgotten, when dignitaries rub elbows with street urchins, and when milady and her servant meet in the same social sphere.”49 When Miss Anderson lifted her voice to sing “America,” democracy was redeemed. “It was more than a concert for me,” she said later. “It was a dedication. When I sang that day, I was singing to the entire nation.”50 Six weeks later, at the invitation of the president, Marian Anderson performed at the White House dinner given for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.