Jean Edward Smith

by FDR

56. Federal Emergency Relief Act of 1933, Public Law 15, 73d Congress, May 12, 1933.

  57. “The half-billion dollars for direct relief of States won’t last a month if Harry L. Hopkins, the new relief administrator, maintains the pace he set yesterday in disbursing more than $5,000,000 during his first two hours in office,” said The Washington Post. Quoted in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History 44 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).

  58. Ibid. 48. Hopkins’s salary as administrator was $8,000 annually. In New York he earned $15,000.

  59. Federal expenditures in FY 1932–33 amounted to $4.6 billion, receipts totaled $1.9 billion, leaving a deficit of $2.7 billion. Bureau of the Census, Statistical History of the United States 711 (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965).

  60. Charles Wyzanski to his parents, April 29, 1933. Wyzanski MSS., reproduced in Freidel, Launching the New Deal 431. On loan from the Department of Labor to the Justice Department, Wyzanski successfully defended the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act before the Supreme Court in 1937. NLRB v. Jones Laughlin 301 U.S. 1 (1937); Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, 301 U.S. 548 (1937). He was appointed to the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts by FDR in 1941.

  61. The public works program was Title II of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. Public Law 77, 73rd Congress.

  62. The 1932 Democratic platform stated, “We advocate protection of the investing public by requiring to be filed with the Government, and carried in advertisements, of all offerings of foreign and domestic stocks and bonds, true information as to bonuses, commissions, principal invested, and interests of the sellers.”

  63. Message to Congress, “Recommendation for Federal Supervision of Investment Securities in Interstate Commerce,” March 29, 1932, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 93–94. The White House public statement concerning the legislation is ibid. 94.

  64. Securities Act of 1933, 48 Stat. 74, Public Law 22, 73rd Congress. For FDR’s statement when he signed the act, as well as figures pertaining to the act’s effectiveness, see 2 Public Papers and Addresses 213–215. The most useful description of the law’s passage remains James M. Landis, “The Legislative History of the Securities Act of 1933,” 28 George Washington Law Review 33 ff. (October 1959).

  65. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 320–321.

  66. Hoover, 1 The State Papers of Herbert Hoover 526–527, William Starr Myers, ed. (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1934).

  67. The date of FDR’s visit to Muscle Shoals was January 21, 1933. In addition to Norris, the delegation included Senators Clarence C. Dill, Cordell Hull, Kenneth McKellar, Hugo Black, and John H. Bankhead; Congressmen John Rankin, Luther Lister Hill, and John J. McSwain; plus Frank P. McNitch of the Federal Power Commission, Frank P. Walsh of the New York Power Authority, and E. F. Scattergood of the Los Angeles power system.

  68. The New York Times, January 22, 1933.

  69. Message to Congress, “A Suggestion for Legislation to Create the Tennessee Valley Authority,” April 10, 1933, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 122–123.

  70. Rankin’s comment was to the House Military Affairs Committee, quoted in Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 324–325.

  71. Congressional Record 2178–2179, 73rd Cong., 1st Sess.; The New York Times, April 26, 1933.

  72. 48 Stat. 58; Public Law 17, 73rd Congress.

  73. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 148–149 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  74. 2 Public Papers and Addresses 136n.

  75. “A Message Asking for Legislation to Save Small Home Mortgages from Foreclosure,” April 13, 1933, ibid. 135–136.

  76. Home Owners Loan Corporation Act, 48 Stat. 128; Public Law 43, 73rd Congress. The $20,000 ceiling in 1933 would be the rough equivalent of $280,000 in 2006.

  77. 2 Public Papers and Addresses 233–237n.

  78. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 298.

  79. Moley, After Seven Years 369–370.

  80. William Lindsay White, Bernard Baruch 82 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950).

  81. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century 302–303 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).

  82. Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” New York Herald Tribune, April 18, 1933.

  83. Those in attendance included Secretaries Hull and Woodin, Budget Director Lewis Douglas, Moley, James Warburg, Charles Tausig, Herbert Feis, William Bullitt, and Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

  84. Warburg diary, April 18, 1933, quoted in Freidel, Launching the New Deal 333.

  85. Moley, After Seven Years 159.

  86. Quoted in Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 200.

  87. Moley, After Seven Years.

  88. Thirteenth Press Conference, April 19, 1933, Complete Presidential Press Conferences 153 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972). FDR’s reference to Lippmann appears in the original official transcript. It was deleted when Judge Rosenman republished the transcript in Roosevelt’s Public Papers. Cf. 2 Public Papers and Addresses 137–141.

  89. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 202; Leffingwell to FDR, October 2, 1933, FDRL.

  90. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 112–113 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).

  91. “It was as comfortable as a camp can be,” Eleanor told her press conference afterward. “Remarkably clean and orderly, grand-looking boys, a fine spirit. There was no kind of disturbance, nothing but the most courteous behavior.” Quoted in Blanche Wiesen Cook, 2 Eleanor Roosevelt 46 (New York: Viking, 1999).

  92. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 15.

  93. For a firsthand account of FDR’s surprised response to the Black bill, see Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 192–195 (New York: Viking Press, 1946).

  94. “A Recommendation to the Congress to Enact the National Industrial Recovery Act to Put People to Work,” May 17, 1933, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 202–206.

  95. 48 Stat. 195, Public Law 67, 73rd Congress.

  96. Using a conversion factor of 13.89, that would amount to roughly $35,000 currently.

  97. Press Conference, March 8, 1933, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 37.

  98. Quoted in Ray Tucker, “Ickes—and No Fooling,” Collier’s, September 30, 1933. Jonathan Alter’s lively The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006) appeared too late to be helpful, but see especially pages 207–318.

  SIXTEEN | New Deal Ascendant

  The epigraph is from Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power 229 (New York: New American Library, 1960).

  1. J. B. West with Mary Lynn Kotz, Upstairs at the White House 18, 23 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973).

  2. FDR’s daily schedule is discussed by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal 511–515 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959); Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years 201–205 (New York: Random House, 1979); Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Launching the New Deal 267–288 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); and Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom 284 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003). I am indebted to each.

  3. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 65–66. Gloster, a champion trotter, was raised by FDR’s father, sold to Leland Stanford, and killed in a train wreck on the West Coast. See chapter 1.

  4. Time, March 20, 1933.

  5. Eleanor lunched daily in the Private Dining Room, adjacent to the State Dining Room, on the first floor. Chief Usher West reports these were formal lunches for at least twelve and that ER often wrote the place cards herself. West, Upstairs at the White House 19. For Stimson’s luncheons with FDR, see Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War 300–301 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948). For Flynn’s visits, see Edward J. Flynn, You’re the Boss 161–168 (New York: Viking Press, 1947).

  6. Admiral McIntire was an ear, nose, and throat specialist. His main concern was FDR’s sinus problems and head colds. See Ross McIntire, W
hite House Physician (New York: Putnam, 1946).

  7. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 214 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).

  8. Hemingway’s comments are in a letter to his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, from the Bahamas, August 2, 1937. “Martha Gellhorn, the girl who fixed it up for Joris Ivens and I to go there [Hemingway married Ms. Gellhorn in 1940] ate three sandwiches in the Newark airport before we flew to Washington. We thought she was crazy at the time but she said the food was always uneatable and everybody ate before they went there for dinner.” Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 470, Carlos Baker, ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981).

  9. Ickes’s comments were written after the annual dinner the Roosevelts gave for the cabinet on December 18, 1934. “Wine was served for the first time since prohibition went into effect. Mrs. Roosevelt had announced she would serve one glass each of two domestic wines and she kept her word. The sherry was passable but the champagne was undrinkable.… I am bound to say that probably on only one other occasion have I ever tasted worse champagne, and it does seem to me that if decent champagne can’t be made in the United States, it ought to be permissible, even for the White House, to serve imported champagne.” 1 The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 248–249 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953).

  10. John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 93 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).

  11. Henrietta Nesbitt, White House Diary 19–20 (New York: Doubleday, 1948).

  12. Blanche Wiesen Cook, 2 Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999).

  13. Grace Tully, F.D.R.: My Boss 115 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949).

  14. Nesbitt, White House Diary 66.

  15. James Roosevelt with Bill Libby, My Parents: A Differing View 213 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976). ER chided James for his criticism of Mrs. Nesbitt. If the president did not like the food or the menus, it was her responsibility since she approved them, wrote Eleanor. ER to James Roosevelt, July 30, 1959, quoted in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 501 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).

  16. Lillian Rogers Parks and Frances S. Leighton, The Roosevelts: A Family in Turmoil 69–70 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981). The observation is by Ms. Parks.

  17. Nesbitt, White House Diary 185.

  18. Parks, The Roosevelts 30–31.

  19. Ibid. 170.

  20. “Mary was devoted heart and soul to the Boss and warred with the rest of the White House management to see to it that he got what he wanted,” wrote Grace Tully. “From the time of her arrival the fare in the family kitchen, at least, took a decided turn for the better.” F.D.R.: My Boss 117–118.

  21. Ibid.

  22. West, Upstairs at the White House 78.

  23. Ickes, 1 Secret Diary 461.

  24. John Garner interview, U.S. News & World Report, March 8, 1957.

  25. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 117 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).

  26. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 513, 580–581.

  27. Amberjack II, built in 1931 by George Lawley and Son of Neponset, Massachusetts, was owned by Paul Drummond Rust, Jr., a college friend of James. Seaworthy and easy to handle, the two-masted vessel had finished third the year before in Fastnet, the grueling 3,000-mile transatlantic race to England, though it was the smallest vessel competing. If not luxurious, it was well appointed and had a 40-horsepower gasoline auxiliary engine. Robert F. Cross, Sailor in the White House: The Seafaring Life of FDR 9 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003).

  28. Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, June 24, 1933.

  29. Edmund W. Starling and Thomas Sugrue, Starling of the White House 308–311 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946).

  30. Cross, Sailor in the White House 13.

  31. The New York Times, June 30, 1933.

  32. Charles Hurd, When the New Deal Was Young and Gay 165–170 (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1965).

  33. Arthur Krock interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.

  34. Quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 205 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

  35. Davis, FDR: New Deal Years 339. In 1922, Walsh served as director-general of the Papal Relief Mission to the USSR and also as the Vatican’s representative to the Soviet government.

  36. For the State Department’s attitude, see Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace 17–22 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977). Morgenthau’s role is discussed extensively in John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries 54 ff. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959).

  37. When a newsman asked FDR who was going to conduct the negotiations with Litvinov, the president pointed to himself and said, “This man here.” Undersecretary of State William Phillips tried to persuade FDR to say publicly that the State Department was not being cut out, but Roosevelt refused. Martin Weil, A Pretty Good Club: The Founding Fathers of the U.S. Foreign Service 87–88 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), quoting Caroline Phillips’s journal, October 27, 1933.

  38. Cf., United States v. Belmont, 301 U.S. 324 (1937); United States v. Pink, 315 U.S. 203 (1942), emphasizing the sovereign power of the U.S. government to conduct foreign relations. “We take judicial notice of the fact that coincident with the assignment, the President recognized the Soviet Government, and normal diplomatic relations were established,” said Justice George Sutherland for a unanimous Supreme Court in Belmont. “The effect of this was to validate, so far as this country is concerned, all acts of the Soviet Government here involved.… [As for the taking clause] our constitution, laws and policies have no extraterritorial operation, unless in respect of our own citizens.” Justice Sutherland, it should be noted, was the intellectual leader of the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court in the 1930s.

  For the text of the Litvinov Assignment, see 2 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 484–486, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Random House, 1938).

  39. Quoted in Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal 207.

  40. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 178 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  41. Hugh S. Johnson, The Blue Eagle from Egg to Earth 208 (New York: Doubleday, 1935).

  42. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 178.

  43. On January 7, 1935, in Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan, 293 U.S. 388, the Court, speaking through Chief Justice Hughes, struck down the “hot oil” provisions (Section 9) of the NIRA (Cardozo dissenting). Four and a half months later, in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935), a unanimous Court completed the process and held all code provisions in the NIRA unconstitutional.

  44. 295 U.S. at 501.

  45. Press conference remarks, May 31, 1935, 4 Public Papers and Addresses 205.

  46. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 252–253. Marion Dickerman, a houseguest in the White House when the decision was announced, reports that she dreaded going down to dinner that evening. But FDR showed “no sign of dismay or even minor perturbation. The Supreme Court was not so much as mentioned!” When Marion went to Roosevelt’s bedroom to say good night, “He was sitting up in bed with his old sweater on, working on his stamps. To all appearances he was perfectly happy and at peace with the world.” Kenneth S. Davis, Invincible Summer 134–135 (New York: Atheneum, 1974). The NRA was terminated by Executive Order 7252, December 21, 1935. 4 Public Papers and Addresses 503.

  47. Executive Order 6420B, Creation of Civil Works Administration, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 456–457. Ickes proved surprisingly cooperative. “This would put a serious crimp in the balance of the public works fund,” he confided to his diary, “but we all thought it ought to be done.” November 6, 1933. 1 Secret Diary of Harold Ickes 116.

  48. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 175.

  49. The final total was $933 million, of which $740 million went for wages. 2 Public Papers and Addresses 457–458.

  50. Quoted in Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 220.

  51. Quoted in Harry Hopkins, Spending to Save 114 (New York: Norton, 1936).

&
nbsp; 52. Lieutenant Colonel John C. H. Lee, “The Federal Civil Works Administration: A Study Covering Its Organization and Operation,” Hopkins Papers, FDRL.

  53. For FDR’s message requesting the SEC, February 9, 1934, see 3 Public Papers and Addresses 90–91. The act was signed into law on June 6, 1934. 73rd Congress, Public Law 291; 48 Stat. 881. The FCC message was sent to the Hill on February 26, 1934, and the act was signed June 19, 1934. 73rd Congress, Public Law 416; 48 Stat. 1064. 3 Public Papers and Addresses 107–108.

  54. The Railroad Retirement Act was signed into law June 30, 1934. It was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court May 6, 1935, Justice Roberts speaking for a sharply divided (5–4) Court. Alton Railroad Co. v. Railroad Retirement Board, 295 U.S. 330 (1935).

  55. FDR signed the Gold Reserve Act on January 30, 1934. 48 Stat. 337. The following day he issued Executive Order 2072, fixing the gold content of the dollar at “155⁄21 grains nine-tenths fine,” which was 59.06 percent of its former value. 3 Public Papers and Addresses 64–76.

  56. FDR’s letter to Rainey, June 18, 1934, is in the personal collection of Conrad Black and is quoted at page 322 of his Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  57. When Roosevelt finished his address he winked at James Farley, one of the invited guests at the White House: “Jim, didn’t you think it was a good campaign document?” Farley agreed wholeheartedly, “and we made much use of it.” James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 47 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1948).

  58. “None of them have been consulted by the President,” wrote Kent. “Most of them have been completely ignored. Yet until two years ago, they were the most conspicuous and respected leaders of the party.” Frank Kent, “Which Way Will the Elephant Jump?,” American Magazine (December 1935); Kent, Without Grease 8–10 (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1936).

  59. Quoted in Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 484.

  60. “To put it in a Biblical way,” FDR continued, “it has been said that there are two great Commandments—one is to love God, and the other to love your neighbor. A gentleman with a rather ribald sense of humor suggested that the two particular tenets of this new organization say you shall love God and then forget your neighbor, and he also raised the question as to whether the other name for their God was not ‘property.’ ” Press Conference 137, August 24, 1934. 4 Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 18 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).