by Amity Shlaes
And the New Deal was not proceeding perfectly. The national economy might have moved forward, but it still was not back to 1929 levels. “Everything was not happy in New York,” either Tugwell would write of the city in that period. The bookish types did not care that it was New York (the Yankees) versus New York (the Giants) in the World Series. Now—perhaps because it was not a campaign year—the intellectuals in the city found themselves talking about the New Deal with the business community, whose doubts were stronger and older. In Washington, Roosevelt might seem invincible and 1937 might seem the year for permanent revolution. But that was Washington. In New York, for the intellectuals at least, 1937 would be a year of self-doubt.
The doubt began with a personal shock—the reminder that not everyone approved of the way the intellectuals and New Dealers had executed their ideas. Columbia had granted Tugwell several leaves to serve in Washington, but now the university was telling him it could not welcome him back. His former dean at the Wharton School, who now led the Economics Department at Columbia, gave him the news. “I meekly sent in my resignation and Columbia’s hands were washed of me permanently,” he would write later. This was “perhaps the hardest to bear.”
Roosevelt had so often advised him not to mind the bad press, but now Tugwell could see that that press would have a permanent cost. As Harcourt Brace, a publisher of a textbook he had written, would report that year, sales of the book had gone down when a school superintendent in Gary, Indiana, William Wirt, attacked Tugwell as a leftist. These were consequences he now had to confront. He was after all an academic—a man who liked to experiment, to speak his mind. Uncertain, Tugwell boarded the Scanpenn in late January with Charlie Taussig. The ocean liner headed for the Caribbean. But the feeling could not be the same as it had been traveling the warm waters with Roosevelt on his Potomac.
Within a month, Tugwell had cause to reconnect with his old chief. While in Barbados, Tugwell learned that his twenty-year-old daughter, Tanis, had fallen ill with double pneumonia and entered Presbyterian Medical Center. It was hard to secure a flight north. Turning to the old familiar hand for help, Tugwell cabled Roosevelt. And the hand was there: Roosevelt asked Juan Trippe of Pan Am to hold a plane at Trinidad for Tugwell. Even this was not enough, for only a fishing smack was available to take Tugwell to Trinidad. In the end Pan Am helped out with a special flight from Barbados to Trinidad as well. Two Costa Ricans were bumped, but Tugwell made it to Tanis’s bedside. The daughter recovered. It is hard not to read a bit of wistfulness in the act of the ex-undersecretary turning to his ex-boss. Tugwell’s relationship with Roosevelt was still in the news, but often as a form of ridicule: in March the papers carried some material on Roosevelt’s farming diversions in Georgia. The president had two mules, the story noted, “Hop” and “Tug,” after Hopkins and Tugwell. In March the papers carried bad news: the first of Tugwell’s projects, twelve rural settlements, were writing off 25 percent of their costs as unsustainable. The freestanding communities he had envisioned were not becoming reality. Tugwell’s doubt in this instance was not about the reception of the New Deal; it was about the actual success of the programs themselves.
Tugwell did not speak publicly of regrets. Nor did he criticize the Roosevelt team—he was loyal. But Moley, who was now at Newsweek, a new competitor of Time, was definitively breaking with the president. Speaking at a meeting of advertisers, he talked about the lexicon of the New Deal. He praised the New Deal—up to 1935. Since then, however, there had arisen “new and fantastic counterparts” to the early New Deal. These later counterparts were too intrusive, and Moley could not approve of them.
In May the city itself provided reminders of the conflicts inherent in the New Deal. Roosevelt had created the Works Progress Administration to help labor; the same thought was behind his signature of the NIRA and the Wagner Act. But he had warned that the government would not always be able to afford to pay for the jobs. Now Roosevelt wanted to balance the budget, and some WPA jobs had to go. Instead of accepting the change, as perhaps Roosevelt expected them to do, the WPA workers were mimicking their private-sector brothers and striking. This seemed like ingratitude. How much, after all, could the government pay them? As if that was not sufficient, the WPA workers were striking not merely over labor but also over the political positions that newspapers were taking.
The New York Daily News editorialized against the WPA, arguing that it ought to be abolished in favor of an entity less subject to the sway of “politicians and communists.” Local workers of the WPA promptly announced a “mighty mass protest” against the paper. Writers on staff at the Federal Writers’ Project staged a sit-down strike across the street from the News at 235 East Forty-second Street. Even Hallie Flanagan of the theater group went along. In the same weeks she noted that the WPA workers were striking for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Most New Deal supporters were more uncertain—in New York or elsewhere. They were taken aback at the brutality of unionization across the country. Some automakers had already unionized—General Motors, for example. But in Detroit, Henry Ford was still holding out. The basis of Ford’s protest was that Ford could not afford the cost of unionization, logically enough. Companies like Ford were taking the position that it was illegal for strikers to strike within the factories—it was a trespass, a violation of company property rights.
Emboldened by the Wagner Act and its ambiguous language, the workers went farther—onto company property. Ford’s company police retaliated by beating the protestors at its River Rouge plant, including a UAW organizer named Walter Reuther. Time reported that the workers were demanding a higher per-hour wage than offered by Ford or any other automaker. Reuther’s battered face would become a national emblem of company brutality.
On Chicago’s South Side, Douglas was rethinking things. “These sit-down strikes resembled the seizure of factories by the Italian unions in the fall of 1920,” he would write. On Memorial Day weekend workers at Republic Steel paraded, pushing to get the company to unionize as U.S. Steel already had. Police turned on the crowd with revolvers and clubs, clubbing and killing even workers fleeing the scene. Douglas, still a professor, was asked by the editor of the Chicago Times to look into the Little Steel Massacre. He agreed, and moderated a protest meeting held at Insull’s opera house.
Two problems stood out, observers noted. The first, again, involved the legality of the strikers’ behavior. Both sides, Wall Street and unions, had worked so long and hard to see the Wagner Act passed; the idea all along had been to create a legal basis for protest. Now, instead of staying within the safe confines of the law, the protestors were pushing the envelope, seeing how far they could take the country. The strikes had the effect of escalating the battle: “They frightened most employers,” concluded Douglas. To him and others the pattern—concession followed by escalation and radicalization—seemed far too much like not only Italy but Russia after Kerensky or Germany after Weimar for comfort.
The next problem was that the Communists were clearly active in the union movement. Lewis defended the practice, but many of the original labor supporters were apoplectic—Green at the American Federation of Labor, for instance. Douglas was also disturbed. He would complete the report on the Little Steel Massacre, Douglas recalled telling the Chicago paper in his memoir, but only if Communists were not assigned to work on the project with him. The boot steps of the fascists of Europe rang in Douglas’s ears. He feared both the Communist Left and the Right. He had heard Benito Mussolini announce Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia at the Piazza Venezia in Rome. Now he was becoming convinced that for the American Left to ignore all this was wrong, and that “isolationism was impossible and pacifism self-defeating against dictators.” Frances Perkins, too, uttered her concern: “unwise and demoralizing,” she concluded of the sit-downs.
Another problem, less articulated, was a simple economic one. To raise wages without increasing output hurt company profits and made goods more costly for consumers.
Perhaps some of the companies could afford that, but it was no incentive to produce. Some consumers might be able to afford higher prices—but others, those working in nonunion industries, might not be able to. The idea that an increase in labor’s wages would automatically restore the economy to its 1929 level was taking a long time to prove itself.
At the TVA, too, there was trouble. Roosevelt had fueled the tension between Lilienthal and Morgan by leading both men on. But this year, Lilienthal’s biographer notes, the president was “studiously uninterested” in the fight at the TVA. Lilienthal found the going “tough”; both he and H. A. Morgan, his ally, hunted for evidence that A. E. was cooperating with Willkie. By September, A. E. Morgan would go on one of his retreats and leave his affairs to be managed by Harcourt Morgan. Wrote one TVA official in his diary of the dream: “Our own TVA is almost bellum omnia contra omnes, a war of all against all.” Scarcely what the New Dealers had hoped for.
Every day there were more dark reports from Russia. Stalin had been holding his trials for some time. He had also announced an increase in his war budget of a full third. In June came news that he was trying eight of his most important generals, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a World War I hero well known to Americans. And the trial would be secret. Tukhachevsky had escaped the Germans four times in that war, but it did not seem likely he would escape his fellow Soviets. The intellectuals in New York had enormous trouble with this announcement, coming as it did on top of Trotsky’s flight from Russia. They had always thought that in its way Leningrad was like New York and Paris. But the Soviets were proving that their cities were disastrously different.
Mary McCarthy typified the sudden indecision. McCarthy at first supported Stalin, as did her friends. And like her peers, she made a show of spurning the bourgeoisie; at the end of the summer of 1937, in fact, she was living an ostentatiously bohemian life with Philip Rahv, a Russian émigré, in a borrowed apartment on East End Avenue. In the summer, McCarthy handed in to the Nation a review that would be published just below one by Rahv. Her review attacked an American newspaperman who had published a book titled The American Dream. The author, Michael Foster, had written about “the quiet decent people…the silent ten percent whose names are not often on page one, because they are so busy, and who pay very little attention to the shooters and the grabbers.” McCarthy dismissed the author’s emphasis on this group as “absurd.”
At the same time, however, McCarthy was having her doubts about her own positions, most of which involved events in the Soviet Union. She was considering committing herself to Trotskyism. “Tukhachevsky’s murder could not make us happy—on the contrary,” she would write later. “More than I, Philip grieved, I suspect; a boyish part of him was proudly invested in the Red Army.” Trotsky had been thrown out of Soviet Russia. New York writers created a Commission of Inquiry on Trotsky, essentially to generate documentation of the travesty of Soviet justice in his ejection. John Dewey, now in his late seventies, that fall would lead the commission to Mexico to interview Trotsky. “It was the most interesting single experience of my life,” Dewey would say of the trip. Already, in the summer, Trotsky’s claims about Stalin were being vindicated anew each day, in the news. Even he was perturbed. In early July the papers reported that he was off on a fishing trip in Mexico. He told the reporters that “I want to get away from civilization and the press.”
Like Tugwell, McCarthy was also beginning to try on new roles. Building in McCarthy’s mind was a fiction story that she would eventually title “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” The story takes place in the mid-1930s, on a train ride. A young woman writer is heading west to get a divorce, just as McCarthy herself had done. The charm of the character’s first husband, a Marxist theater man, has worn off. Now she does not know what she is looking for. But she is certain that she detests the bourgeois—the type of man who, a decade earlier, would have been called a Babbitt. Then a perfect example of that bourgeois enters the club car, a man in a Brooks Brothers shirt. He is a businessman, a man who has seen the world, and a man who makes companies grow. In short, a description that makes him clearly out of the question as a romantic partner for Mary’s character.
But gradually, over whiskey and then trout, the young woman finds herself interested. “I’ve never known anyone like you. You’re not the kind of businessman I write editorials against,” she tells him. In the morning, she wakes up to find herself in his berth. The theme of the story is clear: the divorce is not merely that of one person from another, but also from the tedium of left-wing politics. “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” was published later and McCarthy’s biographer reports a rumor that the traveler in the story was Wendell Willkie. This was never proven. But the story, in any case, described the summer of 1937 perfectly: a summer in which intellectuals were either becoming Babbitt, or at least getting to know him better.
And one of the Babbitts of real life was Willkie, who now popped up frequently at dinner parties in New York. In these years, Willkie was not merely battling Lilienthal; he was also getting around: among those he would meet were the authors Carl Sandburg, Rebecca West, Dorothy Thompson, James Thurber, the publisher Helen Reid, Henry Luce of Time, and the correspondent William L. Shirer. He socialized—and exchanged ideas—with everyone, in a fashion that would not have been possible for a utilities lobbyist in Washington. He often left Edith behind. Shirer later recalled that Billie, as she was known, spent afternoons at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, across from the apartment. “You couldn’t help but admire her. She was probably terribly hurt. But she wasn’t going to ruin his career.”
The most important of Willkie’s new acquaintances in 1937 proved to be Irita Van Doren, the literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune. A year older than Willkie, she had ended her marriage with Carl Van Doren, the historian.
Irita Van Doren’s relationship with Wendell Willkie was a version of the relationship between McCarthy’s intellectual and her Brooks Brothers man. In the McCarthy story, the love affair is short-lived—the girl turns back in revulsion. In McCarthy’s real life that also proved the case, for she shortly remarried. Her new husband was to be another intellectual, in fact the leading intellectual of her era: Edmund Wilson. Wilson had just the year before published a book likening Stalin’s Russia to Roosevelt’s America: Travels in Two Democracies.
But Van Doren and Willkie were not a fiction, but rather a real story. Their romance shortly became something like a marriage, with weekends at her house in West Cornwall, Connecticut, and visits to her apartment on the West Side. Willkie, like Insull before him, thought he might please his sweetheart by wiring her house for electricity. Just as Insull had once strung cable out to Libertyville, Willkie now asked industry friends to wire Irita’s house in West Cornwall—she had only kerosene lamps. The fact that Willkie was, to the core, always a utility man showed up too in the manner in which he expressed his friendship for Dorothy Thompson, Sinclair Lewis’s wife and Irita’s friend. A few years later, after a visit to Dorothy’s country place in Vermont, he sent her a refrigerator.
Willkie was so proud of Irita, he could not stop himself from bragging. Harold Ickes would later write, “Willkie likes to play with a lot of women and is quite catholic in his tastes.” At some point, Willkie would even tell Lilienthal about his relationship with Van Doren. Van Doren and Willkie were close, Lilienthal would write in his diary: “Wendell told me, rather explicitly, how close.” Lilienthal was not leering; the relationship seemed to him “touching and beautiful.”
But what mattered most was what Willkie and Van Doren learned from each other. He probably exposed her to new economic ideas. He joked that their friendship certainly would not please “your old friends on The Nation.” Still it was Willkie who was the principal learner in the relationship. With Van Doren as a tutor, Willkie studied political and literary classics. He told her that he was interested in the South and that he had thought of writing a history of forgotten figures in American history.
He had always been a follower of Woodrow Wilson’s; he believed in reasonable reform at home and democracy abroad. That was what he shared with Newt Baker, one of the Democrats whom Roosevelt had beaten out for the nomination in 1932. Now Willkie ranged wider. A couple of years into his conversations with Irita—in 1939—he would even publish a review in her paper of a book about one of the old UK Whigs, William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, “the evening star of the great day of the Whigs.” Willkie’s message in the book review for his contemporaries was that business, and perhaps his own utilities industry, had brought some of its troubles upon itself by forestalling reform. He quoted Lord Melbourne as noting: “Those who resist improvements as innovations will soon have to accept innovations that are not improvements.”
Willkie’s publishing and his time with Irita were about more than history. In discovering the old British Whigs, he discovered their liberalism—a liberalism that antedated Wilson and focused on the individual. It resembled the liberalism of Europe that he had heard about in childhood. Revisiting that old liberalism, he could see that while Roosevelt might call himself a liberal, the inexorable New Deal emphasis on the group over the individual was not liberal in the classic sense. Liberalism had historically included liberal economics, and Roosevelt had turned away from that. Willkie was finding the intellectual ammunition for his battles, and Irita was helping him do it.
