The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

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  Curiosity seekers, including small children, gather around the body of a young man named Rubin Stacy, lynched near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in July 1935, a little over two months after the anti-lynching bill died in Congress. Murdered for “frightening” a white woman, he had actually been guilty only of knocking on her door and asking her for a little food.

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  “Here’s Mr. Roosevelt’s Message on Lynching,” the Amsterdam News’s bitter front-page comment on the president’s silence on the subject

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  “This is her first lynching,” drawn for the New Yorker by Reginald Marsh after seeing photographs like this one

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  “Rosy” Returns to Warm Springs

  To most Americans FDR was always “President Roosevelt.” But to his fellow polios at Warm Springs, he was simply “Rosy,” and whenever he could manage it during the White House years he fled Washington to be among them. A few days in Georgia always restored his energy—and lifted the spirits of all the patients struggling to regain their feet.

  During his early days at Warm Springs, FDR had lifted his own spirits by fitting out a farmer’s old Model T with hand controls and setting out alone along the slithery red-clay back roads of Meriwether County. He continued that tradition during his presidency, insisting that the Secret Service stay well behind his car, stopping in front of the drugstore to honk and shout, “Let’s have a Coke!” so that the soda jerk would run out and bring him one.

  “He just dearly loved to leave the road and weave in and out among the long-leaf pines,” Henry Wallace remembered. “He wanted to show that he could go faster than anybody, when he had the right kind of motor behind him.” But he also took the time to stop and talk with people. “He had sense enough to talk to a man who didn’t have any education,” a farmer remembered, “and he had sense enough to talk to the best educated man in the world.… He could talk about anything.”

  “I want to farm just like the local farmers do,” he told the county agent. “The only difference is, I want to make a profit.” He never did, though he bought 1,750 acres of land and tried growing nearly everything on it—pine trees, beef cattle, apples, peaches, grapes. The farm “seemed always to require expenditure for wages, for upkeep, for improvements and for extensions,” Rexford Tugwell remembered. “But it was a delight [to FDR] nevertheless. It pleased him so much because it offered a challenge. He always tended to believe that something could be done with apparently hopeless enterprises.… All his efforts would come to very little in the end; but he had not yet … accepted the inevitable. He was still hopeful.”

  Arriving at the Warm Springs depot and surrounded by admirers, the president prepares to make his way down the ramp kept aboard his specially equipped railroad car. Whenever he was scheduled to visit, people from all over Meriwether County came to town to get a glimpse of him. Roosevelt carried Warm Springs—and Meriwether County—all four times he ran for president, by victory margins that ranged from 12 to 1 to 50 to 1.

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  Around Thanksgiving, Roosevelt loved to preside over “Founder’s Day” at Warm Springs, carving an oversized turkey with a theatrical flourish. In 1939, when this picture was taken, a little patient named Suzanne Pike got to occupy the seat next to him because she had just stood up in her braces for the first time. After the banquet, he always stood in the doorway and shook the hand of every patient.

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  FDR, at the hand controls of his automobile, stops to chat with patients wheeled out onto the lawn in front of a newly dedicated infirmary to see him. “His greatest contribution was himself,” one polio recalled, “the apparent ease with which he handled himself. His example proved to us that ‘A polio could do anything’—even be President of the United States.”

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  Putting Americans to Work

  By the spring of 1935, the panic that had gripped America on inauguration day had largely subsided. And Roosevelt had launched three sweeping new programs: the National Youth Administration to provide training for young people without work; the Rural Electrification Administration, which would light up much of the American countryside; and the Works Progress Administration, which would change the face of much of the American landscape. The WPA built or rebuilt 2,500 hospitals, 6,000 public schools, 10,000 airport landing fields, and enough miles of roadway to pave the continent from coast to coast more than 200 times.

  Jobless artists, writers, composers, and musicians benefited from the WPA as well—Saul Bellow and Thomas Hart Benton, Ralph Ellison and Orson Welles, Berenice Abbott and Alan Lomax, and hundreds of others. It turned out nearly a thousand publications, including guides to all forty-eight states, staged plays and performed symphonies in small towns that had never seen a live performance, revived the art of mural painting on the walls of schools and post offices, commissioned photographers to chronicle the human cost of the Depression, transcribed the memories of American slaves and collected the folk songs all kinds of Americans sang. “Whatever form this [art] took,” the critic Alfred Kazin remembered, “it testified to an extraordinary self-scrutinizing.… Never before did a nation seem so hungry for news of itself.”

  New Deal critics charged that the WPA was a giant boondoggle intended only to benefit the Democrats. FDR was unrepentant. “I realize,” he told an Atlanta audience, “that gentlemen in well-warmed and well-stocked clubs will discourse … on the suffering that they are going through … because their government is spending money on work relief. Some of these gentlemen tell me that a dole would be more economical. That is true. But the men who tell me that have, unfortunately, too little contact with the true American to realize that … most Americans want to give something for what they get … which is in this case honest work.”

  Working for the WPA, the artist William Gropper painted this dam-building mural for the lobby of the Department of the Interior, 1938.

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  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING FOUR IMAGES Posters for New Deal programs, commissioned by administrators convinced both that art should be a part of the lives of all Americans and that out-of-work artists deserved employment just as much as farmers or factory workers did. Eventually, there were poster divisions in eighteen states as well as the District of Columbia.

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  “New Deal Lexicon,” Chicago Daily News cartoonist Vaughn Shoemaker’s take on the New Deal’s fondness for bewildering acronyms.

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  Trouble, Left and Right

  In 1935, the United States was in its fifth year of Depression. Two and a half million Americans had returned to work, but more than ten million remained jobless.

  A drought afflicted forty-six of the forty-eight states. The topsoil of the southern plains was being blown away, and hundreds of thousands of Americans were on the move toward California in search of work. People everywhere were growing impatient.

  On the right, the American Liberty League, organized by some of America’s most powerful industrialists, charged that the New Deal was only making things worse, that Roosevelt had become a dictator, defying the Constitution, encouraging “class warfare.” Their most celebrated spokesman was FDR’s old ally Al Smith, the former Democratic governor of New York. The New Dealers, he said, were hell-bent on socialism. “There can only be one capital,” Smith said, “Washington or Moscow. There can be only one flag, the Stars and Stripes or the flag of the godless Soviets.”

  On the left, socialists and a handful of communists took to the streets, denouncing Roosevelt as a captive of capitalism, incapable of bringing about real change. Other men were peddling other schemes. Dr. Francis Townsend, an elderly California physician, promised to grant a monthly pension to every worker over sixty who was willing to retire and spend the money within thirty days.

  Father Charles C
oughlin, the Detroit radio priest, preached in favor of inflated currency and against Wall Street and international bankers.

  But the biggest threat to FDR’s reelection chances in 1936 came from the South. There was widespread speculation that Senator Huey P. Long, the flamboyant, populist ex-governor of Louisiana, planned to lead a third party coalition against him. Long called his program “Share Our Wealth,” and hundreds of thousands of voters signed up all across the country. Democratic National Committee chairman Jim Farley feared Long would start out with at least 12 percent of the vote, enough to deny FDR several important states—and, perhaps, bring about a Republican victory.

  On Monday, May 27, 1935, things got even worse. The United States Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision, in a case brought by a kosher chicken producer from Brooklyn, which invalidated the National Recovery Administration on the grounds that the NRA had unconstitutionally delegated legislative power. The NRA was already understood to be a failure. It had only raised prices and lowered wages—exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to do. But the grounds on which the NRA decision was made—including a narrow interpretation of the interstate commerce clause—seemed to suggest that other New Deal programs might also be swept away.

  Roosevelt was stunned at first, and denounced the Court for relegating the country to “the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce.” But in early June, just as congressmen were preparing to leave town for the summer, Roosevelt seized back the initiative, calling upon them to enact five major pieces of legislation by autumn.

  In part to steal a little of what FDR called “Huey’s thunder,” he proposed new taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

  He also wanted the Federal Reserve System strengthened and a new law to break up monopolistic holding companies.

  And, in the interest of achieving for ordinary Americans something of the sense of security that had been his since boyhood, Roosevelt threw himself behind two bills initially championed by the Democratic senator from New York, Robert F. Wagner. They would turn out to be two of the most momentous pieces of legislation in American history.

  The first, called the Wagner Act, created the National Labor Relations Board and for the first time provided a federal guarantee of labor’s right to organize and bargain collectively.

  But the second, the Social Security Act, would prove the most far-reaching. It would provide old-age insurance paid for by taxes on employees and their employers, share with the states responsibility for insuring the unemployed, and provide federal aid to the states to help care for dependent mothers and children, the handicapped and the blind.

  There was a sweltering, bruising, summer-long struggle on Capitol Hill. Compromises reduced the impact of some of the legislation. But newspapermen called it the “Second Hundred Days”—and the beginning of a Second New Deal.

  And then, in September, Huey Long was cut down by an assassin’s bullet. The road to Roosevelt’s reelection now seemed wide open.

  FDR greets a farmer’s son near Julesburg, Colorado, where there had been no rain for months and the soil itself was blowing away. “YOU GAVE US BEER,” read a placard along his route, “NOW GIVE US WATER.” Roosevelt answered, “That beer part was easy.”

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  By 1935, when the humor magazine Life published this caricature of Al Smith, the progressive Democratic candidate for president just seven years earlier had become the best-known voice of the conservative Liberty League.

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  Voices of the opposition:

  A Communist Party pamphlet charges that the New Deal is merely a cleverly disguised capitalist assault on the working class.

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  Dr. Francis Townsend spells out his plan to provide jobs for young people by paying older workers to give up theirs.

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  Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, America’s most popular radio performer, who had once told his listeners “the New Deal is Christ’s Deal,” has now decided Roosevelt is “anti-God.”

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  Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long, whose promises of shared wealth and talk of leading a third party make some Roosevelt advisers nervous about the president’s prospects for reelection in 1936

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  The New York Times reports the events of “Black Monday,” when the Supreme Court struck down the NRA—and seemed to threaten the whole New Deal. “AMERICA STUNNED,” said the London Daily Mail. “ROOSEVELT’S TWO YEARS OF WORK KILLED IN TWENTY MINUTES.”

  With Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and the bill’s author, Senator Robert F. Wagner (third from left), looking on, FDR signs the Social Security Act, August 15, 1935.

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  Social Security records in a Maryland warehouse

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  A poster urging all eligible Americans to sign up and get their Social Security cards. When critics on the left criticized the new law for exacting contributions from employees as well as employers, FDR was unrepentant: “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

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  A Never-Ending Voyage

  In public, Franklin Roosevelt always projected cheerful optimism. Even in private, he rarely let anyone know how he really felt. But beginning in the late summer of 1935, he began making an exception for his admiring distant cousin, Daisy Suckley.

  One afternoon that month in Hyde Park, he took her for a drive in his hand-controlled car to a favorite picnic spot, the crest of a forested ridge on the Roosevelt property he and Daisy had named “Our Hill.” There, they began what they both called their “voyage,” confessing to one another the loneliness each sometimes felt, speaking of a special bond of friendship, agreeing to share confidences by letter and long-distance telephone.

  “Do you know that you alone have known that I was a bit ‘cast down’ these past weeks,” he wrote to her. “I couldn’t let anyone else know it—but, somehow, I seem to tell you all those things and what I don’t happen to tell you, you seem to know, anyway!”

  He even spoke to her of the pain his braces sometimes caused, something he never mentioned to his wife.

  Franklin addressed her as “M.M.” for “My Margaret,” and carried her letters with him wherever he went. She sometimes signed her letters “Y.M.”—“Your Margaret.” They sent one another long-distance mental messages.

  She once tried to summarize their relationship:

  Dear F. Do you mind if I do a little thinking aloud … ? The subject is friendships and the way they start and grow—an introduction, a shake of the hand, a few casual words to begin … and the friendship … usually finds very definite limits not so far from the surface.

  On rare occasions, however, it seems to start in the deepest depths—a never-ending voyage of discovery … with never a feeling of fear because of the safe and solid ship one is underfoot.

  They planned together a stone cottage to be built on their hilltop where she began to hope, after he had finished the traditional two terms, she might live with him as his nurse and companion. Daisy often appeared at FDR’s side throughout the remainder of his presidency, so quiet and unassuming and discreet that his own secretaries, puzzled by her presence, dismissed her as “the little mud wren.”

  Daisy Suckley and three of her Scotties on the lawn of Wilderstein, her family home at Rhinebeck, New York

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  A 1935 letter to FDR that includes her drawing of the hilltop structure she hoped to share with him and liked to call “O.H”—“Our House.”

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  The president visits the construction site with New York’s mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and Congresswoman Caroline O’Day, one of Eleanor’s closest allies. Top Cottage was not completed until 1939.

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  FDR’s o
wn plans for his cottage, 1938. When they were published with his initials in the corner, licensed architects denounced him for claiming to be an architect when he had no license.

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  Daisy Suckley took this snapshot of her great friend at a hilltop picnic in Dutchess County. FDR occupies a car seat, pulled out of his automobile by the Secret Service. The Scottie in his lap was Daisy’s gift to him. Roosevelt’s original name for his new pet was “Murray the Outlaw of Falahill,” after a sixteenth-century Scottish ancestor, John Murray of Falahill, but it was quickly shortened to “Fala.”

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  That Man in the White House

  To his admirers, FDR could do no wrong. “Every house I visited,” the journalist Martha Gellhorn marveled after a visit to the southern textile region, “millworker or unemployed, had a picture of the President. These ranged from newspaper clippings (in destitute homes) to large colored prints, framed in gilt cardboard.… And the feelings of these people for the President is one of the most remarkable phenomena I have ever met. He is at once God and their intimate friend; he knows them all by name, knows their little town and mill, their little lives and problems. And, though everything else fails, he is there, and will not let them down.”