Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  Then he turned to organized religion—to the growing Social Gospel movement in which some Protestant clergymen were attempting to secure social justice for the poor by adding a moral element to the reform movement, reminding businessmen, for example, that sweatshops were antithetical to Christian teaching. Olds had been quietly but deeply religious at college—he won Amherst’s Bond Prize for the best talk given at chapel—and his year in South Boston had led him, he was to recall, to believe that the evils of the new industrial order “were not going to be cured by economic and political measures alone, although these must not be neglected, but by what would be in the nature of a religious revolution” in which “people really applied the principles of Christianity to their everyday business.” After studying for two years at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, he was ordained as a Congregationalist minister of a small church in a working-class parish in Brooklyn.

  Leland Olds never talked much about the disappointments he suffered in that parish. One of his grandchildren was to write that he came to feel “that the church was not actively enough involved with the problems that faced society at that time,” but Olds himself would say only, “My experience suggested that I might accomplish more through teaching.” He enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University, studying European history, which he later taught at Amherst.

  During World War I, however, he was hired as a low-level statistician by the government’s Industrial Relations Commission, and assigned to study the level at which wartime wages should be set. Going beyond the scope of his assignment to satisfy his own curiosity, and displaying a startling gift for analyzing huge masses of raw economic data, the former mathematics honor student concluded that the root cause of the poverty he hated so passionately was the fact that labor was not receiving its fair share of the nation’s increased productivity and wealth, and that labor unions must be given the right to bargain collectively. He realized that he wanted to teach not college students but the labor union activists who were closer to the front lines of the fight for social justice. He became the head of the research bureau of the American Federation of Labor, which was striking against the powerful Pennsylvania steel companies and railroads.

  In one Pennsylvania steel town after another, Olds witnessed the brutality with which the strikes were suppressed; he himself was shot in the leg as he was watching police break up a demonstration. For the rest of his life he was to remember his shock at the discovery that the “great railroads were deliberately contracting out their locomotive repair work in order to create unemployment among their own employees.” He was to remember how the children of the railroad workers were hungry. And he was to remember, also, an “inspiring” conversation with a white-haired Roman Catholic priest in Braddock, Pennsylvania, who had allowed striking steelworkers to meet in his church, until mounted police rode their horses into it to break up the meeting.

  The Pennsylvania struggle ended in defeat—the companies were simply too strong for the unions, Olds was to say—and he emerged from it convinced that labor’s only hope lay in the intervention of government on its side, that “railroad workers … must look forward either to government ownership of the railroads or to the political influence necessary to secure protective labor legislation,” that if workingmen were ever to earn a living wage, they must be guaranteed the right to organize—and that if government did not secure them that right, the American system of government would perish. “The preservation of the American democratic system required” this “evolution” of democracy, he believed—and to educate labor’s “rank and file” about this necessity, Olds turned from research to writing.

  Because “the labor angle on news of strikes, negotiations and so forth was not adequately covered by the general press,” a wire service, the Federated Press—similar to the Associated Press and the United Press, which supplied articles for general-circulation periodicals—had been established in 1918 to provide labor-oriented articles. Most of its eighty subscribers were union newspapers and magazines such as the Locomotive Engineers Journal and the Seattle Union Record, although among its other subscribers was the Communist Daily Worker. The Federated Press had no money to hire an additional staff writer, but Olds’ brilliance as an economic analyst had attracted the attention of liberal and Progressive leaders, and, eager that Olds’ analyses continue, the civil rights activist Roger Baldwin persuaded a liberal foundation, the Garland Fund, to pay part of his $3,600 salary. In 1922 he went to work as Federated’s “industrial editor.”

  It was the Twenties—the Twenties of Harding and Coolidge and Hoover, the Twenties of “normalcy” and complacency, the Twenties in which the federal government and courts, high and low, seemed to regard themselves as allies of Big Business, allowing corporations to break strikes and unions, relaxing even token regulations on business, and abandoning social reform. In the Twenties, tariffs and profits and the stock market rose and rose again—and wages, so inadequate to begin with, fell further and further behind, so that workers received a steadily smaller share in the prosperity their toil had helped to create.

  In 1919, when reformers’ hopes for a fundamental redistribution of wealth and power—for a new social order—had been high, President Wilson had advocated “a genuine democratization” of industry; a “cooperation and partnership based upon … worker participation in control” of industry; unions and Progressives had more specific—and radical—planks: for nationalization of the railroads, and public operation—“along socialistic lines,” in William Allen White’s phrase—of natural resources like oil, water, and mines. In New York, Governor Alfred E. Smith was proposing not only a minimum wage law and an eight-hour day for women but state ownership of hydroelectric power. The AFL was urging nationalization not alone of railroads but of all key industries. So many liberal dreams had, for a moment, seemed within reach. Now, in the Twenties, labor was asleep again; the union movement, grown cautious and conservative, represented mainly the skilled crafts; the vast majority of America’s overworked, underpaid workers were not members of any union. Dreams had faded. Liberal intellectuals responded by revolting against traditional liberalism, becoming, in their frustration and discouragement, more radical, many believing that a fundamental transformation of American society was required if individualism was to be rescued from its entrapment by a society based on the profit motive. Attracted by the model of the Soviet Union, and feeling that America’s choice was between the ruthlessness of untrammeled private enterprise and a planned, governmental, collectivism, some advocated varied forms of democratic collectivism—perhaps a national economic council representing business and labor as well as government—to preserve what was good in the American tradition.

  Leland Olds was a part of this new, radical, liberal current. His gift for economic analysis and his outrage over social injustice fused in the articles he poured out, at least five a week, for the Federated Press between 1922 and 1929. When President Coolidge refused to cut the sugar tariff because of the “hardships” of sugar beet companies, Federated’s industrial editor analyzed the companies’ annual reports and found that their true annual profits were as high as 32 percent. And then, turning to Labor Department studies—studies all but totally ignored by the “general press”—he contrasted the profits with the human cost that had created them. These studies showed mothers and children as young as six working up to fifteen hours a day at dangerous jobs in the sugar beet fields, he wrote in a Federated Press article published on July 1, 1925; at night, families “huddled together in shanties which were not even waterproof, and with practically no decent provision for sanitation.” The Sugar Trust’s “exorbitant profits,” made “at the expense of women and little children … reveal the hypocrisy of President Coolidge in his apology for refusing to cut the sugar tariff.”

  He saw the power of big money everywhere—in universities, whose investment portfolios were filled with railroad and oil stocks. (“Needless to say, the dependence of universities on these securit
ies for their incomes influences their view of the economic problem”), and in the church. When a Methodist bishop publicly boasted about his stock market profits, the indignation of the idealist who had once become a minister to help the poor boiled over. The bishop’s financial speculations are “just another proof of the decay of the church as a religious institution and its transformation into a handmaiden of the capitalist system,” he wrote. Religions now preach “the principles of the exploiting class.” Pointing out that while securities given as gifts represented a substantial portion of colleges’ and church portfolios, they represented a very small portion of the wealth of those who made the gifts, he wrote bitterly: “Give till it hurts means nothing to the money princes who govern industry, endow education, and generally distribute royal gifts to the Glory of God and the admiration of the populace. They simply can’t give till it hurts. They have too much.”

  And of course, he saw the power of big money in government. When a keynote speaker at the 1928 Republican convention boasted that the United States had achieved a 25 percent rise in gross national product at the same time that labor costs were falling by 10 percent, Olds said, the boast was “hollow … unless he shows what the party has done for the millions of workers laid off in the process. Never was it more clear that the Republican Party is the party of big business, the party which represents the closest alliance between industrial rulership and political administration.”

  Not that the Democrats were much better, he wrote; the problem lay in the political system as a whole. The belief that “a political system created in a much simpler economic era still affords the people effective control through their votes over the complex industrial state which has come into being” is a popular delusion. “Politicians must perpetuate this idea, for their jobs depend on it,” but “a true keynote speech would reveal the political government handling certain administrative details for an immensely powerful ruling class.”

  Only a complete transformation of the American economic system—“the complete passing of the old order of capitalism” with its laissez-faire government and unfettered economic individualism—would cure the problems, Olds said. The old ideal of democracy had become perverted; the idea of political freedom had resulted in the loss of the economic freedom which alone could really insure political freedom. “Without such a transformation,” he wrote, “to millions of workers … the Fourth of July will loom as anything but the birthday of liberty.”

  Such a transformation had already begun in other countries, Olds said, as was shown by the rise of unions in England—and the resultant general strikes there. Changes were coming from both the right and the left, Olds said. He detested Fascism, but even in Fascist Italy, “supposed bulwark of capitalism,” the state—Mussolini—had enacted laws against exorbitant rents and profits, and had begun jailing landlords and shopkeepers who violated them. “Here is certainly a breach which may widen until the sanctity of private property in the capitalist sense follows the divine right of kings into the discard. Inevitable changes in the economic organization of society are exposing it as just another myth….” As for Communism, he had always distrusted it; “in my opinion, the very theory of Russian communism represents a negation of democracy,” he was to say, and his distrust was reinforced by his religious convictions: “I rejected the approach of Karl Marx because I felt that the road to harmony must recognize spiritual values and that ambition for power was an unwholesome influence in human affairs.” Seeing—more clearly than many American liberals in the Twenties—the danger that Communist infiltration posed to American liberalism, and to the American labor movement, when he attempted briefly during this period to help form a new, progressive party in Illinois, he was so concerned “to keep Communists from infiltrating” that he wrote into the party’s “Qualifications for Membership” a statement that “no person who advocates the overthrow of the Government by force or violence or who supports organizations having that end in view will be accepted,” and into its constitution a statement that “The new party must… build on the fundamentally American tradition that all are entitled to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Importation of theories and influences not germane to American life must be ruled out”—as must “slogans and formulas produced by the struggle in other lands.” Yet along with so many liberals of the time, he saw various innovations in Russia—vacations with pay, still relatively rare in America; improved working conditions for children—as significant social advances. By reducing child labor, he wrote in 1926, Russia “leads the world in its attempt to guarantee every child a chance to flower.”

  But whether the transformation of the American system came from the right or the left, Olds wrote, it was coming.

  The attempt to run twentieth-century industrial states with governmental machinery designed in the eighteenth century is breaking down. This is the significance of revolutionary events in Russia, Italy and England.

  Lenin knew what would take the place of political partyism when he made his bid for power in Russia with the slogan “All power to the Soviets.” Mussolini… saw it when he moved to constitute in Italy under his dictatorship a government composed of the industries rather than regions, with the dominant branch of Parliament composed of representatives of organized labor and capital.

  Already in other countries a new age is being born which will succeed capitalist political democracy. The parliamentary systems are decadent.

  The changes in America would have to take a different form from those in other countries, Olds wrote, or the particular—and precious—values of the American democratic system would be lost. “Theories developed to meet European conditions fail to include the values the American worker is seeking,” he said. What democracy would evolve into was not yet clear, he wrote. “The new order will be a world order, but not the ideal world order envisioned either in capitalist America, Fascist Italy or Socialist Russia.” A “promise, answering the yearning of people in an American environment,” is needed—and “so far it has been lacking.” But evolve democracy must, he wrote in article after article—or democracy would die.

  So vast were the social inequities in the present system that the changes in that system would have to be equally vast, he wrote. Despairing—as many liberals during the decade of outward prosperity under laissez-faire capitalism despaired—that government would ever rein in capitalism, so powerful had it become, he saw no solution in the case of giant industries but nationalization or some other drastic reorganization: since the power of the Coal Trust was effectively preventing the United Mine Workers from bargaining collectively, the miners have only “two alternatives: to develop, along with the rest of organized labor, political power sufficient to put over nationalization, or to seek control by the workers themselves under a worker government.” In the case of the giant utilities, Olds (again in conformance with the prevailing liberal theory of the 1920s; it was not Leland Olds but Governor Franklin Roosevelt of New York who said, “The water power policy of the Democratic Party is socialistic, if you like,” but “I want the government of this State to develop the power sites of this state, because the Government can do it better than anybody else”) advocated nationalization or some more imaginative alternative such as operating utilities “as giant consumer cooperatives.”

  DURING HIS WARTIME YEARS in Washington, Olds had met, and later married, Maud Spear. The daughter of a teacher in government schools for Indians, she had been raised on Indian reservations all over the West; then, at Oklahoma A&M, had become one of the first women in the United States to earn an advanced degree in civil engineering, and had been working in Washington with the War Department. During the 1920s, the Oldses had four children. They were quite poor, of course—their only income was his $3,600 salary—and when they moved to Northbrook, Illinois, a little working-class town near Chicago, for the Federated Press job, with his own hands Olds built a house for his family; until he could teach himself wiring, the house had no electricity. The only hea
t was that provided by a big kitchen stove; hanging blankets in a square around it, to keep its heat concentrated, Maud would gather the children inside the square.

  The sacrifices they were making didn’t bother Lee or Maud, but increasingly they felt as if the sacrifices were for nothing. In working-class North-brook, Olds was to say, “I had an opportunity to observe the difficulties faced by many of my friends and neighbors as a result of protracted periods of unemployment which occurred even during the Golden Twenties.” He felt that the solutions he was advocating in his articles could have reduced unemployment, but the solutions were not adopted—nor, he felt, even listened to. His articles changed nothing. The strikes for which he did research and wrote bulletins were defeated. The labor movement in which he had believed so deeply, and to which he had dedicated so much of his life, was, as it grew steadily more conservative and more timid, no longer something he believed in very deeply. His voracious reading had convinced him that, as he was to tell a friend, “Even men supposed to have shaped history were in the hands of something stronger than they were, and that applies equally to Napoleon and the man in the ranks.” He had, he felt, been looking all his life for a cause worth fighting for, and he had not found one.

  And then he did.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1929, with the Federated Press unable to continue paying its share of his salary, Olds accepted a lucrative offer with an economic consulting firm, but there was something he wanted to do first. He had come to feel, he was to say, that he was not sufficiently knowledgeable about a significant American business: the electric power industry. One of the country’s great business libraries was Chicago’s John Crerar Library. So, Olds decided, before starting his new job, he would “take a month’s vacation” and spend it in that library, “studying the power and utility situation in all its aspects.”