by FDR
Ten minutes after Farley’s draft statement arrived at the White House, James Roosevelt was on the phone. “Father has struck the last two sentences out,” he told Farley. The decision was made by the president on the spot. He was not lured into the purge by ideologue advisers; Hopkins’s thumbprints were not on it, nor had Corcoran hoodwinked FDR. The decision to intervene in the upcoming Democratic primaries was made by Roosevelt, and it was made in January 1938. “An albatross, not of my own shooting, was hung from my neck,” wrote Farley. “From that time on I knew no political peace.”79
First up was Florida, where pro–New Deal senator Claude Pepper faced an uphill primary fight against Congressman J. Mark Wilcox of West Palm Beach, an ultraconservative member of the Florida business establishment who made opposition to the wages and hours bill the centerpiece of his campaign. Wilcox was a marvel on the stump, and prognosticators gave Pepper little chance. In the colorful rhetoric of the Sunshine State, Wilcox titillated backcountry audiences with rumors that Pepper had been guilty of celibacy before marriage and addicted to monogamy ever since.80* On February 6, 1938, James held a press conference in Palm Beach, where he announced the White House’s support for Pepper in the primary. Thomas Corcoran, a Harvard Law School classmate of Pepper, funneled funds from private donors into the campaign, and on May 3 Pepper won an upset victory, beating Wilcox by 65,000 votes. Alabama and Florida made it two for two for the administration.
The next primary was in Iowa on June 7, 1938. FDR was determined to defeat incumbent senator Guy Gillette, a leading spokesman for midwestern farm interests who had made the cardinal error of opposing the president’s Court-packing plan. The fifty-nine-year-old Gillette, who had represented Iowa in the House before moving to the Senate in 1936, had supported most New Deal measures.81 But for Roosevelt the litmus test of party loyalty was the Court battle, and Gillette had been on the wrong side. Hopkins, an Iowa native, became the president’s surrogate. He convinced Congressman Otha Wearin to challenge Gillette in the primary, publicly endorsed Wearin (as did James Roosevelt), and mobilized whatever federal employees he could on Wearin’s behalf. All to no avail. Gillette enjoyed the support of the state organization; Agriculture secretary Henry Wallace—the most prominent Iowan in Washington—declined to support Wearin; and Gillette’s Senate colleagues rallied to his side. Taking aim at Hopkins’s role, Montana’s Burton K. Wheeler declared that “Congress in appropriating for the relief of the underprivileged never intended that these funds should be utilized to slaughter a member of this body.”82 Gillette won in a landslide, receiving more votes than his three primary opponents combined. “I will not,” he told Iowa voters, “be a rubber stamp member of Congress.”83
Stung by Gillette’s victory, Roosevelt entered the fight himself. On Friday, June 24, having just signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, FDR devoted his second fireside chat of the year to an attack on the “Copperheads” in the Democratic party who resisted change.* “We all know that progress may be blocked by outspoken reactionaries,” said Roosevelt. But those who posed as progressives and then voted against change were a more serious threat. “As head of the Democratic party … charged with the responsibility of carrying out the definitely liberal declaration of principles set forth in the 1936 Democratic platform, I feel that I have every right to speak in those few instances where there may be a clear issue between candidates for a Democratic nomination involving these principles.”84
Roosevelt’s first stop was Kentucky, where Alben Barkley was in the fight of his life against the popular governor, Albert B. “Happy” Chandler (later commissioner of baseball). Farley advised hands off. “I am fond of both Barkley and Chandler,” he told FDR. “I wish they could both win.”85 But the president was determined that Barkley be returned. Speaking to voters in Covington, Kentucky, on July 8, he devoted his entire address to praising Barkley’s liberal outlook and legislative experience. “I have no doubt whatsoever that Governor Chandler would make a good Senator,” said FDR. “But I think my good friend, the Governor, would be the first to acknowledge that as a very junior member of the United States Senate, it would take him many, many years to match the national knowledge, the experience and the acknowledged leadership in the affairs of the Nation of that son of Kentucky, of whom the whole Nation is proud, Alben Barkley.”86
At the direction of the White House, Hopkins unlimbered the administrative apparatus of the WPA on Barkley’s behalf, and on primary day Barkley defeated Chandler easily.87 The blatant involvement of the WPA (as well as Chandler’s use of state workers) triggered a senatorial investigation that culminated in the passage of the 1939 Hatch Act, barring political participation by federal employees. “These facts [in Kentucky] should arouse the conscience of the country,” said Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas, who chaired the investigation. “They imperil the right of the people to a free and unpolluted ballot.”88
FDR identified ten senators he hoped to purge in the primaries. Gillette, the first to face the voters, won handily. Four were ultimately deemed too secure to challenge.* One, George L. Berry of Tennessee, had gotten crossways of Memphis boss Ed Crump, and the Shelby County organization rendered the coup de grâce. Frederick Van Nuys of Indiana outmaneuvered his opponents and was renominated by acclamation at the Indiana Democratic convention on July 12. That left three in the president’s sights: Walter George of Georgia, “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, and Millard Tydings of Maryland. George had voted against the New Deal one third of the time since 1933; Smith almost half; and Tydings a whopping 77 percent—an opposition record among Democrats exceeded only by the eighty-year-old Carter Glass of Virginia, who was not up for reelection.89 In the House, Roosevelt focused on the Rules Committee and targeted three members for defeat: John J. O’Connor of New York, Howard Smith of Virginia, and Eugene Cox of Georgia.90
On August 11 FDR journeyed to tiny Barnesville, Georgia (1930 population 5,392) to dedicate a new rural electrification project. The little hamlet was jammed with more than 50,000 people who had come by car and wagon and pickup truck to see and hear their Warm Springs neighbor, the president of the United States. On the platform of notables with FDR were Senator George and his two primary opponents: Lawrence Camp, the young U.S. attorney from Atlanta who was the administration’s candidate; and the gallus-snapping, race-baiting Eugene Talmadge, the state’s former governor. Roosevelt wasted little time before he jumped into the primary fight. As an adopted son of Georgia, the president said, he felt “no hesitation in telling you what I would do if I could vote here next month.” The issue was liberal versus conservative. Senator George “is a gentleman and a scholar. He will always be my personal friend. [But he] cannot possibly in my judgment be classified as belonging to the liberal school of thought.” Roosevelt said he had known former governor Talmadge for many years. “I am very certain in my own mind that his election would contribute very little to practical progress in government.” FDR said his candidate was Lawrence Camp: “a man who honestly believes that many things must be done and done now to improve the economic and social conditions of the country.”91 When Roosevelt finished, he and George shook hands. “Mr. President,” said the courtly senator, “I regret that you have taken the occasion to question my Democracy and to attack my record. I want you to know that I accept the challenge.”92
For the next month Walter George, a charter member of the Senate’s inner club, carried the fight to every crossroads and creek bottom in the state. Roosevelt’s intervention was “a second march through Georgia,” he told rapt audiences from Valdosta to Mountain City.93 When the votes were counted, George won easily, with 141,235 to Talmadge’s 103,075. FDR’s candidate finished a distant third, with 76,778.94
In South Carolina the race turned ugly. Smith was the Senate’s senior Democrat, elected when Taft beat Bryan in 1908. As longtime chairman of the Agriculture Committee, he had earned the sobriquet “Cotton Ed” for the solicitous care he bestowed on the South’s plantation economy. The political sci
entist V. O. Key, Jr., once said of Smith that he was “unrivaled as a critic of the New Deal, unmatched as an exponent of white supremacy, and without peer as a defender of southern womanhood.”95 But Smith was long in the tooth and suffered from Potomac Fever—the disease endemic to legislators who spend too much time in Washington. Of all those earmarked by FDR for defeat, he seemed the most vulnerable. To challenge Smith, the administration convinced Governor Olin D. Johnston to make the race. Johnston announced his candidacy from the steps of the White House, and that gave Smith a tailor-made issue to excite the unreconstructed sentiments of his South Carolina constituents: Washington can’t tell the people of the Palmetto State how to vote! Arguing states’ rights and “New Deal Reconstruction,” Smith resorted to one of the most vicious racist campaigns in South Carolina history and beat Johnston by 10 percentage points.96 Smith was asked after the election if Roosevelt was not his own worst enemy. “Not as long as I am alive,” he snapped.97
FDR intervened most vigorously in Maryland. Of all those the president sought to purge, Millard Tydings was the most guilty of party disloyalty. Congressman David Lewis, the House sponsor of Social Security, was persuaded to contest the seat, and Roosevelt barnstormed the state over the Labor Day weekend with Lewis at his side. He spoke six times, never mentioning Tydings by name but making it clear that he considered Maryland’s senior senator a political turncoat. “Any man—any political party—has a right to be honestly ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal.’ But the Nation cannot stand for the confusion of having him pretend to be one and act like the other.”98 Tydings, like George and Smith, made White House intervention the principal issue in the campaign. When the ballots were tabulated on September 13, Tydings defeated Lewis by 60,000 votes.
Roosevelt had taken on four senior Democratic senators and lost four times. In the House, both Eugene Cox from Georgia’s second district and Judge Howard W. Smith, who represented northern Virginia, were returned easily. FDR’s only victory in the 1938 purge campaign was the toppling of Rules Committee chairman John J. O’Connor in New York.* Roosevelt put the best face on it. “Harvard,” he said, “lost the schedule but won the Yale game,” meaning that O’Connor’s removal from his powerful post more than compensated for the New Deal’s other defeats.99
FDR’s intrusion into the primaries eroded his standing in Congress and further divided the Democratic party. Having put his prestige on the line and lost, Roosevelt placed New Deal candidates in jeopardy come November. Congressman Maury Maverick lost in Texas and Governor Frank Murphy went down in Michigan, as did George Earle in Pennsylvania. In New York the ticket won, but Governor Lehman’s margin of victory over Manhattan district attorney Thomas E. Dewey was less than 1 percent. Republicans picked up eighty-one seats in the House, took eight more in the Senate, and won thirteen governorships. Roosevelt was stunned. He told Farley he had expected to lose one seat in the Senate and perhaps sixteen in the House.100 The Democrats retained control of Congress, but it was no longer the party FDR had led for the last six years. “We have a large majority,” said Garner, “but it is not a New Deal majority.”101
Roosevelt was a lame duck. Farley and Garner were taking presidential soundings, Hull was restless, and liberals scanned the horizon for a possible successor. If the downward momentum continued, the Republicans had their best shot at the White House since 1928. “Clearly,” wrote Washington newsman Raymond Clapper, “President Roosevelt could not run for a third term even if he so desired.”102
* Led by Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina—an early Roosevelt supporter—conservative Democrats used the special session to reach out to the GOP and draft a bipartisan ten-point “Conservative Manifesto” that denounced sit-down strikes, demanded lower taxes and a balanced federal budget, championed states’ rights, and defended private enterprise against government encroachment. As one historian has written, “The manifesto constituted a kind of founding charter for modern American conservatism.” David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 340 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
† The other three were Vice President Garner, Joseph Robinson, and James Byrnes of South Carolina. See Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race 79 ff. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
* FDR’s bitterness was directed at Congress, not the Court. “Hughes is the best politician in the country,” he told SEC head William O. Douglas with undisguised admiration. By 1938 whatever animosity there may have been between the president and the chief justice had been dissipated, and they continued to enjoy cordial personal relations. William O. Douglas, Go East, Young Man 327 (New York: Random House, 1974).
* In his 2003 biography of FDR, Conrad Black took issue with the school of historiography that asserts that recovery in the United States lagged behind that of other industrial countries. As Lord Black points out, American unemployment figures did not distinguish between those who had no job whatever and those working for the WPA, in the public works program, or enrolled in the CCC. All were lumped together as “unemployed.” When the relief workers are factored in, American unemployment totals drop by almost 60 percent. “None of the other Western democracies,” writes Black, “provided so much or such original emergency relief employment as the United States did.” Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom 430 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003). Also see Black’s review article “No Bleeding Heart,” 5 Claremont Review of Books 27–29 (Spring 2005).
* The history of Reconstruction became the life work of the historian William A. Dunning and the graduate students who studied with him at Columbia University. Their factually dubious but influential writing championing white supremacy determined the way many Americans see Reconstruction even today. For a critique of the “Dunning School,” see Jean Edward Smith, Grant 699–700 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).
* Thomas Corcoran put it more succinctly: political calculus took precedence over moral outrage; antilynching was too hot for FDR to touch. “He does his best with it, but he ain’t gonna lose his votes for it.” Corcoran, interview with Nancy J. Weiss, May 23, 1977, cited in Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR 119 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).
† Roosevelt’s concern about the constitutionality of Wagner’s bill was not entirely misplaced. In United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876), the Reconstruction-era Supreme Court invalidated the operative sections of the Enforcement Act of 1870, which made it a federal crime to deprive any citizen of his or her constitutional rights. “The power of Congress to legislate does not extend to the passage of laws for the suppression of ordinary crimes within the States,” said Chief Justice Morrison Waite. Whether the Hughes Court, which was pacesetting in matters of civil rights, would have invoked, overruled, or distinguished Cruikshank is a matter for speculation.
* On June 13, 2005, the Senate, by voice vote, formally apologized for its failure to enact antilynching legislation in the 1930s. “The Senate failed … our nation,” said Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, the chief Democratic sponsor of the resolution. The New York Times, June 14, 2005.
† The incident occurred when Miss Bethune’s voice cracked while speaking at a benefit for Bethune-Cookman College. ER was on the platform and procured the water for Miss Bethune. “This is democracy in action,” said a black policeman at the event. “The wife of the President of the United States pouring a glass of ice water for a Negro woman who’s real black—she’s black as a black shoe.” Quoted in Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln 255.
* “I realize more and more that FDR is a great man,” Eleanor wrote to her friend Lorena Hickok in October 1936. “[H]e is nice to me but as a person I’m a stranger and I don’t want to be anything else.” Quoted in Doris Faber, The Life of Lorena Hickok 221 (New York: Morrow, 1980).
* “You and I know the average outsider does not receive such an offer,” wrote James many years later. “I was willing
to take advantage of the fact that I was not the average outsider. I have always felt that, even if I accepted undeserved opportunity, if I worked hard to make the most of it on my own, any success I had would be deserved.” James Roosevelt, My Parents: A Differing View 252 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976).
* In contemporary figures, Elliott’s 1933 and 1935 salaries would be equivalent to $417,000 and $658,000, respectively. Considering the low tax rate of the period, the buying power would have been much greater.
* Black was nominated by FDR on August 12, 1937 to replace retiring Supreme Court justice Willis Van Devanter. He was confirmed (63–16) on August 17 and took the oath of office on August 19. Black was the first of Roosevelt’s eight appointees to the Court.
* In 1950 Pepper was defeated for reelection by Congressman George Smathers, who informed Florida voters that Pepper’s actress sister was “a practicing thespian living in New York’s Greenwich Village.”
* “You will remember,” FDR told his radio audience, “that it was the Copperheads who … tried their best to make Lincoln and his Congress give up the fight, let the nation remain split in two and return to peace—peace at any price.” 7 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 395, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1941).
* Alva Adams of Colorado; Pat McCarran of Nevada; Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri; and Augustine Lonergan of Connecticut. Clark had voted against the administration 42 percent of the time, Adams 36 percent, McCarran 35 percent, and Lonergan 21 percent. James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal 348–349 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967).
