by Lynne Olson
The extent of the president’s loss of influence had been immense. When he first took office in 1933, he could do no wrong. The American public, facing economic catastrophe and yearning for strong leadership, supported virtually every program he proposed, and Congress marched behind him in lockstep.
In later years, the New Deal did draw increasing fire from business and industry executives, Wall Street bankers, and other well-to-do Americans, who condemned its penchant for heavy government spending, stricter federal regulation of business and banking, and encouragement of labor unions. The president’s conservative foes claimed he was a revolutionary, intent on destroying “the American way of life.”
Even so, Roosevelt appeared invincible. For all the vitriolic sniping at him by his critics, he was extremely popular with a majority of Americans, as demonstrated by his historic landslide victory over Republican Alf Landon in 1936. Landon carried only two states, and his fellow Republicans suffered calamitous losses in Congress, winning just 89 seats in the House and seeing their Senate roster drop to 17. So many Democrats were elected to the Senate that twelve of their freshmen had to be seated on the Republican side of the chamber—an unusually large number and another humiliating indignity for the GOP.
With FDR’s lopsided majorities in Congress, who could possibly stand in his way? Even as he savored his overwhelming triumph, the president was acutely aware of the answer. Over the past two years, the Supreme Court, dominated by conservative justices, had struck down several key New Deal initiatives. A number of new government programs, including Social Security, were edging up the list for judicial review. Not only was the administration’s second-term legislative agenda in peril, so, it appeared, was the entire New Deal. Buoyed by his huge election mandate, Roosevelt was determined to stop that threat in its tracks.
On February 5, 1937, the president outlined to congressional leaders a piece of legislation that would end up undercutting his influence and authority and severely damaging his administration, the country, and the world for years to come. The biggest mistake of his presidency, the measure—and the battle over it—would greatly strengthen FDR’s political enemies and leave him so unsure of his standing in the country that from then on, he would be reluctant to move more than a few millimeters ahead of public opinion.
Under the legislation, the president would be given the power to enlarge the Supreme Court by appointing as many as six additional justices, increasing their number from nine to a maximum of fifteen. The ostensible purpose of the plan was to improve the court’s efficiency; more than half the current justices were seventy or older—too old, FDR argued, to keep up with the heavy caseload.
Every person in the room knew that his rationale was bunk. What the president had in mind was to appoint a new crop of justices whose views agreed with his. Why not be honest about it? Why try to deceive Congress and the public with an explanation that no one would believe? After all, he was not alone in thinking that something needed to be done about the Court and its relentless obstruction of reform efforts, its seeming determination to grant Congress no power to intervene in social or economic matters through legislation. For more than a year, there had been calls from Capitol Hill and elsewhere for enactment of a statute or constitutional amendment to curb the Court’s power.
Aides and cabinet members had urged Roosevelt to make the Supreme Court a campaign issue in the 1936 election, to explain to voters how the highest judicial body in the land had continually thwarted the will of the people as expressed by Congress. The campaign was the perfect forum in which to seek a mandate for reform, FDR’s supporters contended; regardless of what he said about the Court, there was no way he could lose the election.
Roosevelt, loath to do anything that might narrow his victory margin, refused. Only an unequivocal landslide, he felt, could give him the popular sanction he needed to take on the Supreme Court. And that he had achieved in November. FDR had always been “filled with unbounded self assurance,” his chief speechwriter, Samuel Rosenman, noted, but now it had blossomed into an “overconfidence which, even for him, was spectacular and dangerous.” Again and again, Roosevelt told his aides, “The people have spoken.” With them on his side, he felt he needed no one else.
Sitting in stunned silence as they read the bill, congressional leaders begged to differ. They were dumbfounded by Roosevelt’s springing this extraordinarily controversial measure on them as if they had nothing to do with its becoming law. They were the ones who would have to harry and hound their congressional colleagues into passing it. He had not consulted them, had not worked to build a broad coalition behind the bill before introducing it. In the most flagrant way possible, he had made clear he considered them nothing but errand boys.
For some time now, it had seemed to members of Congress that FDR was taking them for granted. “[M]any Congressmen resented the feeling of being lackeys or rubber stamps of a chief executive who had taken over the legislative function,” noted one journalist. This growing dissatisfaction only served to sharpen the culture clash that had existed between Congress and the administration since the president’s earliest days in office.
On Capitol Hill, there was none of the brisk pace and frenzied, electric atmosphere found elsewhere in New Deal Washington. Congress still carried on in the drowsy, genteel manner of the late nineteenth century, as evidenced by its polished brass spittoons, snuffboxes on senators’ desks, potted palms, and the McKinley-era black sofas and armchairs that adorned the Capitol’s public rooms. Westerners like William Borah still wore string ties on the Senate floor, and in the summer, southern congressmen sported white suits, looking for all the world like plantation owners, as some of them indeed were.
On slow afternoons, several of the more elderly senators could be seen napping in armchairs outside the Senate chamber. A similar atmosphere prevailed in the Senate pressroom, where “news was scarce, and there was not much work to do,” recalled Joseph Alsop, then a young Capitol Hill correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. “One or two of the older men would nod off to sleep on the ample sofas, and the rest of us would draw huge leather chairs up around the fire and trade tales and gossip.”
There was no such lethargy in the executive branch. Throughout the 1930s, government agencies were hotbeds of energy and experimentation, often hovering on the brink of bedlam, where “men rush in and out and fume at the slowness of the elevators.” Young, Ivy League–educated economists, lawyers, professors, and specialists in various arcane disciplines flocked to Washington to join the agencies’ staffs.
Many of these intellectuals were openly patronizing and contemptuous of congressmen and the staff members of their committees, who were largely patronage appointees and had considerable difficulty keeping up with erudite, fast-talking administration witnesses. According to a 1942 study, only four of the seventy-six congressional committees had “expert staffs prepared professionally even to cross-examine experts of the executive branch.”
Congress had nobody but itself to blame for this backward state of affairs. Conservative southern Democrats, who held most of the leadership positions on Capitol Hill, had no interest in increasing staffs or taking any other measures that would help Congress effectively monitor the executive branch and stay abreast of a complex, rapidly changing world. “They didn’t want the institution to change,” remarked the journalist and author Neil McNeil, an expert on U.S. congressional history. That didn’t mean, however, that House and Senate leaders looked kindly on the administration elbowing Congress aside. “It’s no fun to work with [the president],” Rep. Joseph Martin, the House minority leader, once told a reporter. “He don’t ask you, he tells you.”
Attorney General Robert Jackson, who had known Roosevelt when he was governor of New York, once speculated that the president had transferred to Congress a good bit of the combative attitude he had shown toward the New York legislature, which was heavily Republican. As governor, FDR treated the legislature as “a target instead of a collaborator,
” Jackson said, and was always “trying to out-maneuver it.”
Faced with the Supreme Court bill, some of the congressional leaders finally rebelled. After their meeting with the president, Rep. Hatton Sumners of Texas, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced to his colleagues: “Boys, here’s where I cash in my chips.” In the Senate cloakroom, Vice President John Nance Garner, a former congressman from Texas, revealed to senators his opinion of the bill by holding his nose and pointing his thumb toward the carpet.
Since Sumners’s committee would play a vital role in the measure’s consideration, his immediate opposition was an ominous portent of things to come. Soon after introduction of the legislation, the White House began receiving disturbing reports of other congressional Democrats, reliable past supporters of the president, also coming out in opposition. According to Marquis Childs, an influential Washington newspaper columnist, the court reform bill was “the signal that released all the smoldering animosity that had been obscured” by Roosevelt’s landslide. “Within the space of a few hours,” Childs wrote, “the lines were drawn for a battle that served in large part to nullify the thundering majority of two months before.”
And there was even more bad news for FDR. The leader of the Senate fight against the legislation was to be Burton Wheeler, a feisty progressive Democrat who just a few years earlier had been a strong Roosevelt supporter. To the Republicans’ delight, members of the president’s own party had decided to take the initiative in the battle against him.
The gregarious, cigar-smoking Wheeler was once described by Life as “one of the wiliest and toughest operators in American politics.” A bare-knuckle political fighter with a “cool and deadly” smile, the senator had adopted as his motto: “If I don’t get them, they’ll get me.” Considering his earlier life, the maxim made perfect sense.
The tenth son of an impoverished Quaker shoemaker in Hudson, Massachusetts, Wheeler had worked his way through law school at the University of Michigan, then headed west, looking for a place to practice his new profession. He ended up in Butte, Montana, a tough, hard-bitten copper mining town that seemed to come straight out of the dime Wild West novels that Wheeler had devoured as a boy.
The main power in Butte—and the rest of Montana—was the Anaconda Copper Co., known to Wheeler and other state residents simply as “the Company.” Much like the snake that shared its name, Anaconda was known for its tight grip on those in its coils; it basically controlled the economic and political life of the state. Those who defied the Company did so at their peril, as Wheeler discovered when, first as a young lawyer and then as a state legislator, he campaigned for better working conditions for Anaconda miners. Threats of bodily harm and political reprisals did nothing to dissuade him. “Anything the Company was for, he was ipso facto against,” Marquis Childs noted.
Senator Burton K. Wheeler.
In 1922, Wheeler was elected to the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. He immediately launched an investigation into the involvement of Attorney General Harry Daugherty, a close crony of the recently deceased President Warren G. Harding, in the selling of pardons, acceptance of kickbacks from bootleggers, creation of illegal stock market pools, and intimidation and blackmail of government critics.
Daugherty, who was still in office, fought back against this Democratic upstart. Federal agents ransacked the offices of Wheeler and other members of his investigating committee. They also kept his house under surveillance and shadowed Wheeler and his wife. In 1924, he was indicted for allegedly using his senatorial influence to help a former legal client acquire oil leases. The case, however, had all the earmarks of a frame-up, and a Senate committee promptly exonerated him; soon afterward, a jury acquitted him after deliberating for just ten minutes.
In the end, Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, forced Daugherty to resign, and Wheeler emerged as a national political figure. Years later, a novel based on the freshman senator’s fight against government corruption, entitled The Gentleman from Montana, was sold to Hollywood. The movie that resulted was the 1939 hit Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, starring James Stewart.
In 1930, Wheeler was the first Democrat of national stature to call for the election of Franklin Roosevelt, then governor of New York, as president. At the 1932 Democratic convention, he played an important role in getting Roosevelt the nomination, and during the campaign, he traveled throughout the West on FDR’s behalf. In 1935, he was asked by Roosevelt to lead the battle for Senate passage of a controversial measure to curb the power of utility holding companies. The nasty, hard-fought struggle ended in triumph for both the Montana Democrat and the administration.
By early 1937, however, the ambitious Wheeler, who had designs on the presidency himself, had become disenchanted with the man he had helped elect. He complained of increasing difficulty in getting access to Roosevelt and of the administration’s favoring his political enemies in Montana with patronage that should have gone to him. He noted that the last time he had run for reelection, the president had traveled the state without ever mentioning his name. Wheeler was an inveterate grudge collector, and he had collected a sizable number against FDR.
During Roosevelt’s presidency, Wheeler had become part of the ruling crowd for the first time in his life. But the role of insider didn’t really suit him. He was always more comfortable in opposition, whether to the Company, to government corruption, or, in 1937, to what he considered the president’s growing lust for power, which, in his view, threatened Congress as well as the Supreme Court. “I’ve been watching Roosevelt for a long time,” Wheeler told the presidential aide Thomas Corcoran. “Once he was only one of us who made him. Now he means to make himself the boss of us all. Your Court plan doesn’t matter: he’s after us.”
Relishing the battle ahead, Wheeler marshaled his forces against the White House and Senate Democratic leadership. It was a clash of extraordinary intensity, one that would last for months and arouse the passions of the country. Joseph Alsop would later call the Court fight the “greatest national debate to take place in Congress during my career there” and “the greatest single political drama I have witnessed in Washington.”
As winter gave way to spring, the hemorrhaging of congressional support for the president’s proposal picked up speed. What began as a clash between the president and Supreme Court had evolved into a venomous, no-holds-barred fight between the executive and legislature. After weeks of debate, the Senate defeated the bill on July 22, 1937, with 20 members in favor and 70 against. Most of those voting in opposition were Democrats.
When the congressional session had begun in January, Roosevelt, fresh from his landslide victory, had towered over the Washington landscape. Now, as Congress prepared to adjourn, he was so politically weakened that, as one historian put it, “the chances of congressional passage of anything he proposed were diminished by the very fact that he had proposed it.”
Having handed Roosevelt the worst trouncing of his presidency, Wheeler reveled in his triumph. “I must confess,” he later wrote, “that it gave me quite a thrill when we defeated the President. We could not have had a smarter or more powerful antagonist.” As the victor, Wheeler could afford to be magnanimous. The deeply humiliated president felt otherwise.
On the surface, he was his usual imperturbable, confident, genial self. In reality, however, he was shaken, resentful, angry, and determined to get even. Francis Biddle, who served as solicitor general and attorney general under Roosevelt, once described him as “an Old Testament Christian, who believed that his friends should be rewarded and retribution visited on his enemies, for … once his will was marshaled behind a defined vision, it became sinful for others to interfere with its fruition.”
According to the journalists Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge, FDR “had made up his mind that if he had to suffer, the men in Congress whom he held responsible would suffer doubly later on.” Urged on by his closest advisers, he decided to lead an effort in the 1938 congressional primaries to defeat a
select group of conservative Democratic senators and congressmen who had opposed the court-packing proposal. (Wheeler, who was not up for reelection that year, had his income tax return audited for the first time in his life.)
In previous elections, Roosevelt had relied on his enormous personal popularity with the voters to achieve his electoral goals. By 1938, however, the situation had changed dramatically. The country was in the midst of a severe recession, and, in a Gallup poll taken earlier that year, barely half of those responding said they would vote for the president if he were running for reelection that year.
They still liked him as a person, the voters made clear, but they were increasingly wary of his programs, his advisers, and, above all, his manner of governing. There was particular concern about what was seen as his attempts to gain too much power, with half of those questioned in the poll saying they thought he should have less authority.
Unsurprisingly, then, Roosevelt’s exceedingly bitter campaign to purge his congressional opponents resulted in disaster. Only one of the men he targeted was defeated in the Democratic primaries. Even worse, the Republicans made a dramatic comeback in the general election, nearly doubling their numbers in the House and picking up eight new Senate seats. While the Democrats still held large majorities in the two chambers, both were far more conservative than they had been in the previous five years.
This was the lowest point of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency—and it coincided with the period in which Hitler and Mussolini stepped up their march to war. No matter how much FDR may have wanted to intervene in the darkening European situation, he felt powerless to take any concrete action. “Punch drunk from the punishment” he had suffered in Congress and at the polls, as Interior Secretary Harold Ickes put it, Roosevelt lost his previously unquenchable confidence that the American people would always stand behind him. From then on, his actions and decisions would be dictated by an unwonted wariness and caution, a determination never to get too far ahead of public opinion, which at that point was still profoundly against American involvement in a European war.
