Forgotten Man, The

by Amity Shlaes

  But the emphasis remained political. “He illuminated objectives—even fantastically unrealizable objectives. These excited and inspired,” Ray Moley would later write of Roosevelt, only slightly bitterly. “When one set of these objectives—FDR loved the word—faded, he provided another.” The fact that he shifted did not have to matter.

  Frankfurter, now closer to Roosevelt than ever, noted all this, and also understood that the president was making history, turning away not only from utopians but also from the moderates in his own party. “Last night,” he wrote in a memorandum that summer, “after a very delightful dinner on the South Porch, the President asked Ferdinand Pecora and me into his study in the Oval Room.” Thinking aloud, Roosevelt told his guests about Democrats in Congress, “at bottom, the leaders like Joe Robinson, though he has been loyal, and Pat Harrison are troubled about the whole New Deal. They just wonder where the man in the White House is taking the old Democratic Party.” The Democratic lawmakers feared, Roosevelt concluded, “that it is going to be a new Democratic Party which they will not like.” Still, Roosevelt was resolute: “I know the problem inside my party but I intend to appeal from it to the American people and to go steadily forward with all that I have.” As Roosevelt in 1936 would freely acknowledge to another adviser, the election was about a single issue—Roosevelt. The country had come so far from Coolidge, who had sought to remove the “me” from every scenario he evaluated.

  In advancing this plan, Roosevelt was also refining his definition of his forgotten man. Before, the forgotten man had been something of a general personality—albeit always a poor one. In projects like the NRA, and with grand planners like Arthur Morgan, there had at least been the attitude that the country was all in it together. Now, by defining his forgotten man as the specific groups he would help, the president was in effect forgetting the rest—creating a new forgotten man. The country was splitting into those who were Roosevelt favorites and everyone else. The division started at the top. The president pulled increasingly close to legal pragmatists and yes men—Frankfurter and his entourage, Lilienthal at the TVA, Henry Morgenthau, even Henry Wallace at Agriculture. (Moley, increasingly on the outs, had especially little regard for Wallace: “His oratorical support of his boss” in campaigns, Moley would write later, “was as intolerably partisan as a paid party Spieler, and though he could find no wrong with his own party, he routinely compared the opposition to ‘Nazis and blackguards.’”) He was also pushing away those old allies whose views were too idealistic or simply inconvenient—Tugwell, Moley, Arthur Morgan. Jim Farley, his postmaster and national chairman of the Democratic Party, would encourage this change. It was not good to look too radical. To Tugwell, it was bitter: “I had worked hard and felt I was entitled to speak.” Yet he found that “Roosevelt agreed with Farley to keep me quiet and hidden.”

  Lower down, the constituencies were also of the president’s choosing. Roosevelt rejected, for example, the Bonus Army marchers who had helped him win his first election, refusing to sign a bonus into law. To his mind his plan for Social Security would take care of the marchers; they could receive theirs with all the rest. Congress in any case would do his work for him, restoring programs that had been in place before he cut them back in 1933. He also created new constituent groups. Roosevelt disliked handing out money to the poor. He wanted, as he said, to “quit this business of relief.” Instead he would create work now in other ways. That summer—the summer of 1935—Hopkins was spending the first dollars in the Works Progress Administration, a program that would, the papers said, start 100,000 projects and hire by the millions over the coming months. General Johnson would be the administrator, a job to replace his old post at the NRA. Here, Hopkins and Ickes, always competitive, were going head-to-head in an alphabet competition: Ickes had his PWA, and now Hopkins had the WPA. The WPA work was project-oriented: WPA staffers ran hospitals and dug ditches, opened libraries and served a million school lunches a day. But there was also a financial distinction: Ickes’ projects generally were the ones that cost over $25,000; Hopkins’s ran under the $25,000 line.

  Hopkins established the Federal Writers’ Project to employ unemployed writers, and gave them the legitimately useful task of writing travel guides to towns and regions across the country. Among the hires were 150 jobless newspapermen, whose new jobs had a circular aspect: they were to chronicle the advances of the WPA. Hopkins picked Hallie Flanagan of Vassar to create a theater that would air plays about the social conditions in the country—and again, spotlight New Deal progress.

  This was a chance to hire new tiers of intellectuals. The Federal Writers’ project engaged not only John Cheever and Ralph Ellison but also Anzia Yezierska, John Dewey’s old friend. A young black writer named Richard Wright repeated a few lines of a song he had heard: “Roosevelt! You’re my man! / When the times come / I ain’t got a cent / You buy my groceries / And pay my rent!”

  A National Youth Administration would provide work and education for thousands of college-age young people and high schoolers. The NYA had its own vast bureaucracy; one worker would be a young Texan, Lyndon Johnson. Consumers were Roosevelt’s people too, for the fact that consumers were voters was Roosevelt’s central epiphany. It was what made the spending that Eccles advised so very useful.

  Then there were the blacks. The Roosevelt camp conducted an intensive outreach to all black groups. William Andrews, one of two African Americans in the New York State Assembly, likened FDR to Lincoln before his colleagues in the assembly; Irwin Steingut, also a Democrat although not black, added that the comparison was apt because Roosevelt was “a great emancipator of his time.” Harold Ickes would spend the year serving as Roosevelt’s emissary to this group. And many responded—black registration to vote rose. Ickes’s projects gave blacks a greater share of construction work than they had ever been allotted; a million blacks would take literary classes funded in some way by Washington that decade.

  But there was also new hostility to the enemies Roosevelt had chosen: big companies, employers, the wealthy, those shadows that Moley had described as inhabiting the background of Frankfurter’s life. Utilities were clearly the enemy now as well. The skirmishes were over; the class war was out in the open.

  His plan in place, Roosevelt opened fire. He hadn’t highlighted taxes in a while; they were seen now as merely a part of the greater 1930s story. Visiting her old school, Todhunter, in May, Eleanor had inspected state and federal tax returns prepared by the girls as a study project. Now, however, FDR too turned to taxes. In a message sent to be read aloud to Congress, he railed against the “great accumulation of wealth” and called for a tax bill to change society. The Mellon prosecutions of the spring came to mind. The president wanted rich families to pay an estate tax when they died, but he also wanted their children to pay a second levy, a new inheritance tax, when they inherited the money. There would be a graduated corporate income tax, a shift from the old flat rate for companies, in accordance with Brandeis’s philosophy that big was bad. There would be a sharp increase at the top of the rate schedule for earners above $50,000. And there would be a tax on intercorporate dividends. Roosevelt relished the suddenness of his surprise. Speaking of the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he told Ray Moley, “Pat Harrison’s going to be so surprised he’s going to have kittens on the spot.” Moley disapproved again. The “proposals ran counter to the New Deal’s most elementary objectives,” he said; limiting corporate surpluses would prevent companies, especially small ones, from using their cash to keep workers in downturns, and deepen depressions by leaving companies nothing with which to pay dividends in hard times. “It will aggravate fear,” summed up the Boston Herald.

  Roosevelt was unfazed. Indeed, rather than invite a full-fledged review, he boldly proposed the change as a rider to other legislation. Some members of Congress—those to Roosevelt’s left, pushing for even more punishment for the rich—needed little convincing. Hearing the clerk read Roosevelt’s words, Huey Long cried out f
rom the floor, “Mr. President, before the President’s message is referred to the Committee on Finance, I wish to make one comment. I just wish to say ‘Amen.’” But others were disturbed that the president would try to slip such major legislation in as a rider before the July 4 break. The president shortly canceled the rush order but persisted with the plan.

  Among the first to pick up on what Roosevelt was doing was Lilienthal. Arthur Morgan still backed the idea of sharing a grid with the power companies; striking such a deal, after all, would give him the time and space to build up his utopia. Lilienthal always said he was above politics—“a river has no politics,” as he had said. Still, this was disingenuous, for his actions were all about gaining power. Now Roosevelt had given him new ammunition. Lilienthal therefore busied himself trying to write contracts with municipalities to squeeze Willkie out of the towns. Where he failed—and he was still, mostly, failing—he compensated by delivering his speeches. Earlier in the year, the town of Norris had been finished; both Lilienthal and Arthur Morgan were settling in—their homes were within five minutes of each other. “Boys and Girls Have Been Making Money in Norris” would read a headline in the educational trade press. The Norris School Cooperative enabled children to pool their labor, and even sell insurance and make loans. Nancy Lilienthal, the daughter of director David Lilienthal, would be one of the child leaders in the cooperative.

  In June, the New York Times announced that the TVA would have a distinguished summer worker—John Roosevelt, the president’s son and a freshman at Harvard, who was enlisting as a volunteer to chop and heave along with other TVA workers. The younger Roosevelt, it was promised, “would displace no” laborer. On July 4—to underscore that the TVA was a patriotic project—Lilienthal staged a rally of 30,000, some 7,000 more than Coughlin had drawn, for “TVA appreciation day” in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Two governors were there to survey the majestic train of fifty-seven floats, and the president sent a message to be read aloud.

  Meanwhile, Roosevelt was preparing his pen to sign Bob Wagner’s labor legislation. The act gave workers the same right to organize and to bargain collectively that Roosevelt had hoped to secure through the NRA. In the spirit of other 1935 legislation, the Wagner Act included an economic justification: labor had not been sufficiently organized heretofore, and that itself had caused downturns. The inequality of bargaining power between employees and employers, the act said, tended to “aggravate recurrent business depressions.” Ignoring the importance of productivity, the economics of the law were lopsided.

  Under Wagner Act rules, a union, once in place at a company, might keep out workers who did not join—the so-called closed shop. The same union need not ever again be subject to election by ratification but could represent the workers more or less in perpetuity. The effect was the most coercive of any law passed in the New Deal. Roosevelt had second thoughts about it. Especially disturbing was the act’s clear warning that refusals by employers to allow workers to organize “lead to strikes and other forms of industrial strife.” The suggestion was that employers who did not interpret the new law generously could expect to pay for that with strife—violence—and might even be subject to such violence as a result of pre–Wagner Act refusals. Again, Lilienthal acted with alacrity: he began readying a statement noting that 17,000 TVA workers were entitled to rights and collective bargaining under the new Wagner Act.

  The Wagner Act contained news enough for a year. But there was also the Social Security Act, Perkins’s and Douglas’s plan to provide pensions for senior citizens. Here lawmakers had given Perkins, in particular, a hard time. Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma—a Democrat, though no relation to the Gores of Tennessee—had been blind since childhood. Though presumably precisely the sort of person whom acts like Social Security might protect, Gore was sarcastic. “Isn’t this socialism?” Why no, Secretary Perkins replied. “Isn’t this just a teeny weeny bit of socialism?”

  Now Champ Clark staved everyone off, blocking agreement on the legislation through the heat of July. Roosevelt, however, did not relent, and finally he prevailed: the Social Security Act would be voted on without Clark’s amendment, which had supplied the private companies with an opt-out. There was a promise to study Clark’s concept for consideration in later legislation, but the chance to continue a form of American pension that would show workers there was an alternative to the government provision was fading.

  The motion cameras were ready when Roosevelt entered the Cabinet Room on a mid-August Wednesday. Perkins was there, along with Bob Wagner and Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania—the Guffey who had replaced Mellon’s old ally. There were no newspapermen and the print reporters, humbled, had to ask photographers for details for their story. The participants pulled close to the table and signed what was to be the most famous legislation of Roosevelt’s presidency: the Social Security Act. “The civilization of the past hundred years with its startling industrial changes has tended more and more to make life insecure,” Roosevelt said in a statement. Now, with this pension bill for older citizens, that insecurity would be reduced. Government would begin to provide “a law to flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and inflation—a law that will take care of human needs.” Roosevelt used different pens for different parts of his signature, so that a number of those present—especially Perkins—would have a keepsake from that day.

  Social Security seemed a gift on a scale most Americans would never have expected a president to be able to offer. At a time of—still—so much need, the idea of help seemed in itself a blessing. Even though the first Social Security payment, check number 00-000-001, would not be issued until 1940, people knew that the money was coming.

  To many of the progressives the news that their ideas were finally becoming law was intensely gratifying. Roosevelt hoped the program would make older workers comfortable with the idea of retiring earlier, leaving more work for younger people. Perkins and the progressives liked the unemployment insurance as much as the senior citizen pensions. Paul Douglas would head for Italy that fall of 1935—he had a new wife, the daughter of the sculptor Lorado Taft. From Siena, he wrote: “One who for fifteen years has worked for such legislation may perhaps derive a pardonable sense of satisfaction in the fact that the American public has finally realized that it needs the greater protection against unemployment and old age which pooled insurance gives.”

  That same August, the TVA had more good news: in the first fifteen days of the month the directors had hosted 30,000 tourists, there to inspect the rising Norris Dam. The dam was 253 feet—like a seventeen-story building. And at the end of August, on the twenty-sixth, Roosevelt made the utilities’ nightmare into law: he signed the utilities act. The language of the death sentence was softened, but it was still dire. Holding companies had to limit themselves, Time explained, to a “single integrated system, and” multilevel companies must be reconfigured. The law still restricted private companies in a way that gave significant new advantage to the TVA. On the last day of August, Roosevelt also signed into law his new tax bill, increasing the top tax to 79 percent, increasing estate taxes, and lowering tax-rate thresholds so that more families would pay higher taxes. As if the new holding company act were not enough punishment, the tax bill included a graduated corporation tax—to punish big business—and a dividend tax designed to weigh down holding companies. The summer was ending, but Roosevelt told himself he had reduced, for the moment, the chance of losing constituents on the left.

  In September, news brought further confirmation of that assessment. An assassin felled Huey Long, perhaps the greatest single political threat to Roosevelt’s political coalition. Roosevelt now made a promise to a prominent journalist of what he called a breathing spell—a ceasefire—in his war against business. Stocks, which had been rising, promptly marched up some more. But a breathing spell indeed was all it was. The class war was far from over.

  Tugwell, perhaps watching Lilienthal, now sought to dramatize his successes. On the last day of June he and Elean
or Roosevelt had hosted a conference on the future of housing and resettlement at Buck Hill Falls, Pennsylvania. Stuart Chase had attended. There they had talked about the importance of government’s role in developing communities for migrants and others: “A community does not consist of houses alone,” said Tugwell. “You cannot just build houses and tell people to go and live in them. They must be taught how to live,” Mrs. Roosevelt echoed. Mrs. Roosevelt liked Tugwell because he said what other reformers only thought; “My hat is always off to your courage,” she wrote when he got in one of his tangles.

  Determined to publicize his work further, Tugwell thought of his old friend Roy Stryker, one of the coauthors of his economics textbook back in the 1920s. Through photos and drawings, Tugwell believed, that textbook had triggered more thought than any words-alone text could have. More recently Stryker had suggested to Tugwell that they do a “picture” book together.

  Now Tugwell had an idea. He had seen the modern murals that Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury had commissioned across the country—so many that, that year, a newspaper critic would note in wonder that the New Deal had functioned “more lavishly as an art patron than all the previous administrations lumped together.” Could not he also convince minds through art? Tugwell asked Stryker to work at the Resettlement Administration, to gather evidence that made the RA’s cause and work understandable to the public. Stryker had a good eye and began putting together a staff of photographers—then near-unknowns named Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Lange. Some were already working for government; others were new.