by Glenn Beck
In FDR’s wartime America, “rights” were to be granted no longer by our creator but by the federal government. “Security” was to trump liberty. And if you disagreed with any of that, you were a Nazi or at least someone who didn’t much care for American values.
Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned a professor who was instrumental in drafting FDR’s first inaugural address. This man, Raymond Moley, went on to work for Roosevelt for several years before eventually breaking with him as FDR’s policies bore their poisonous fruit.
In his 1952 book How to Keep Our Liberty, Moley wrote:
It was no secret that a great number of . . . reformers [in Roosevelt’s bureaucracy] were admirers of the “great Soviet experiment.” And some . . . were secret agents of Communism.
In my opinion, there is a greater danger in collectivists than in the betrayal of our secrets to foreign powers. The danger lies in what can be done to a nation by public officials who do not believe in a free economy. In Roosevelt’s day there were many people working for the government who regarded his reforms as a mere prelude to revolution.
America has been fortunate to avoid such a fate so far, but Roosevelt’s revolution not only accomplished more than Wilson and the other progressives who came before him had ever dreamed possible, but it also set the stage for what was to come next.
A New Deal and a Second Bill of Rights were terrific starts, but what America really needed was someone who could pull all of the disparate pieces together. Someone who could appeal to all races and creeds and make Americans believe that they could achieve what no one before them had, that it was their duty to work toward something bigger than themselves, something he called a Great Society.
* * *
PROFILE IN FEAR:
ELEANOR’S DOLLHOUSE
This was his last chance. For most of his life, Teddy Roosevelt had tried to help his younger brother, Elliott. He’d tried to get him to live a vigorous life, to take advantage of their family’s wealth, his good looks, and his easy charm and to contribute something useful to the world.
Instead, Elliott was a reprobate. A spendthrift. A philandering drunk. A dangerous maniac.
Elliott’s latest embarrassment—knocking up one of the servants—had left the family in a state of utter dismay. It only underscored Teddy’s wisdom in filing the lawsuit in the first place.
With his distraught sister-in-law’s approval, he filed to have Elliott judged mentally incapacitated and to take control of his fortune before he spent it all on women, booze, or other passing fancies. The suit did have some negative repercussions—“Elliott Roosevelt Insane” was a headline in one of the New York papers in 1891—but the hope was that the shock of the lawsuit and the likelihood that he might be committed to an asylum (yet again) might finally straighten him out.
It had the opposite effect.
From Paris, where his family had demanded he go in exile, Elliott vowed to fight.
• • •
Teddy boarded a ship bound for Europe. It had been several months since the Roosevelts had seen Elliott in America, and they were relieved that he was no longer causing disastrous headlines and embarrassing the family. Now Teddy was prepared to offer his brother yet another Faustian bargain, hoping to finally bring him around. As Elliott’s anxious family awaited a report, Teddy went to work on his brother.
A few weeks later, the Roosevelt family received a letter from Teddy that filled them with hope. “Won!” the letter read. “Thank Heaven I went over.”
Teddy reported that his brother was “utterly broken, submissive, and repentant.” Elliott had agreed to sign over two-thirds of his property to his wife and to return home and try to make amends with his family, which included his beloved daughter, Eleanor, who still worshipped him.
Unfortunately, Elliott’s experiment with sobriety did not last. Later that year, his wife, Anna, contracted diphtheria, a form of the croup, and passed away. Their son, Elliott Jr., died of the same disease the following year. A distraught Elliott returned to the safety of the bottle and the madness it brought. Not long after, drunk and delirious, he fell from a window and suffered a seizure.
He was dead at thirty-four.
Teddy later wrote that Elliott was pursued by “the most terrible demons that ever entered a man’s body and soul.” But the devastation was most acute in the sorrow of his adoring daughter. In two short years, young Eleanor had lost her mother, her brother, and now her father. She was now, at just nine years old, an orphan.
The loss of her father—“the love of my life when I was a child”—undoubtedly hit her the hardest. She could never completely come to terms with his raging illness, his selfishness, his neglect. She kept the few letters he had written to her like treasures. And for the rest of her life, she clung to the memory of a sainted man who had never truly existed.
Shipped off to her grandmother and living a sheltered existence, young Eleanor had a childhood of depression and panic. She never had the family life she wanted, and she yearned for the safety and security of one. But what she lacked in her personal life she tried to make up for in her ideological views, turning to a belief system that allowed her total control. It was an ideology that promised to heal wounds, those seen and unseen, and to remake the world in her own image. The perfect world she had always wanted.
All of which brings us to a small town in West Virginia.
Authoritarians love to build monuments to themselves. In the 1930s, the fad was to build model cities that demonstrated an ideology’s glory and greatness. Stalin built the town of Magadan in the wilds of Siberia. Hitler built Ramersdorft. And Eleanor Roosevelt built the town of Arthurdale.
Organizing it to respond to the plight of West Virginia coal miners, Eleanor Roosevelt persuaded her husband to make construction of this new city a federal priority. Arthurdale was designed to be a city for the future, a city in which all of its inhabitants would show the wisdom and value of the progressive way of life.
The project was managed by the Division of Subsistence Homesteads (DSH), whose aim was to “build ‘a new American man’ and ‘a new social order’ in which ‘the common good’ would replace ‘selfish motives.’ ” Author C. J. Maloney wrote that these homesteads were to make up small, semi-independent towns under a centrally planned industrial policy designed to decentralize American industry.
Eleanor Roosevelt made it her pet project, overseeing budgets, contacting potential employers who might locate in the city, and raising money for the program in Congress. She’d fix the despair and fear that the miners’ families had experienced in a way that no one had been able to fix her own.
The vision of Arthurdale was nothing short of a worker’s paradise, a place where citizens would spend half of their days working at a factory and the other half tending their own five-acre plots. Industries would flock to the town. It would become a model for cities across America.
Eleanor Roosevelt would visit the town frequently as first lady, attending dances and graduations and frequently talking about its future course. She offered extensive input on the design of new homes, complete with indoor plumbing. Arthurdale was her own real-life dollhouse.
And it was a failure from the start.
The first houses sent to West Virginia had come from Cape Cod and were not very well suited for mountain winters. They also didn’t fit the existing foundations constructed by Arthurdale residents. Fixing this error—along with the many amenities that Eleanor Roosevelt had insisted on—made the homes three hundred percent more expensive than typical American houses.
As one author summarized it: “The planners of Arthurdale, when conjuring an entire town out of scratch, forgot one of the most basic lessons of real-estate investing: location is everything. Arthurdale’s location was less than ideal; in fact, it was in the middle of nowhere.”
Its remoteness made it almost impossible for manufacturers to want to locate there. Various companies, often at the federal government’s urging, set up shop there for
a time but eventually folded. Eleanor Roosevelt had personally persuaded General Electric to open a facility there, but it too quickly shut down. What was meant as a project to show how the government could create a self-sustaining city run by empowered individuals turned out to be an embarrassing and very expensive flop as the costs far exceeded expectations. By 1940, nearly every single citizen of Arthurdale was dependent on a government job.
From the acquisition of the land, through the management of the community, to its collapse in 1948, Arthurdale demonstrated an utter failure of collectivism. All of the town’s holdings were eventually sold off at steep discounts.
Arthurdale was a fitting tribute to FDR progressivism, but it was an even more fitting tribute to how powerful emotions, like the fear of families falling apart, can result in big government projects that offer hope but deliver nothing.
♠
4
Third Wave:
LBJ and the Power of Envy
If only I could take the next step and become dictator of the whole world, then I could really make things happen. Every hungry person would be fed, every ignorant child educated, every jobless man employed.
—LYNDON JOHNSON
Love Field
Dallas
November 22, 1963
Blood was everywhere. The dark, red liquid stained his waking thoughts and haunted him when he closed his eyes. It decorated the leather interior of the limousine that sped toward Parkland Memorial. It was on the gurney that carried his shattered friend. And it was splattered over the pink dress of the dazed woman who stood beside him.
It was a baptism by blood.
Like the state he loved, Lyndon Baines Johnson was large and imposing. His head, his ears, his hands, his voice—they all seemed to overwhelm those around him, traits that helped him make deals with timid, cowering colleagues. But now, in the two hours since he’d first heard those loud pops, the new president of the United States tried his very best to be small.
At 2:28 P.M., aboard a hot and crowded compartment on Air Force One, Johnson raised his massive right hand, placed the other on a Bible, and swore “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” John F. Kennedy’s casket lay next to him, the lifeless body having been rushed to the plane in a hearse within minutes of the president being declared dead. Amid tears and trauma and blood, so much blood, the Kennedy era—what would soon by christened “Camelot”—had come to a violent end.
Unlike others in the administration, it was fair to say that LBJ’s love for his fallen leader was not total. It was hard for a man of destiny and greatness—as Johnson had long seen himself—to surrender his powerful Senate seat in order to play second fiddle to a young man from Harvard who’d probably never worked one hard day in his life.
As vice president, LBJ was largely powerless, mostly marginalized. He knew the Kennedy boys made fun of him. Jackie, who now stood humbly at his side, privately referred to him and his wife, Lady Bird, as “Uncle Cornpone and his little porkchop.” Her deceased husband hadn’t been much kinder, once asking her rhetorically, “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?”
But there was no doubt. Lyndon needed them now, all of them. He needed Jackie, the family, the Cabinet, even his nemesis, Bobby, if he had any hope of leading a nation that didn’t know him and of leading a party that had chosen someone else just three years earlier.
LBJ paced restlessly about the aircraft, avoiding eye contact with the grieving widow. He bit his oversized lower lip as he pondered the task before him. How could he claim the Kennedy mantle when, truth be told, he thought the Kennedy agenda was far too cautious and timid?
He took his seat as the hulking aircraft taxied to the runway. Its four engines soon roared, and the plane shot forward and then up, as if on the trajectory of a rocket. He closed his eyes and relished the blackness.
When he finally opened them a few minutes later, he peered out the window at the endless miles of fluffy clouds beneath him. There, at the top of the world, he decided that the Kennedy presidency would need to be remodeled.
Fortunately, he wouldn’t have to spend much time thinking about whom to model it on. His two idols, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, had already created the template.
Now Lyndon Baines Johnson just had to fill in the blanks.
THE POWER OF ENVY
* * *
Lyndon Johnson came from nothing, lived with nothing, and was expected to amount to nothing. His family had helped settle the great state of Texas, a place where people thought big and dreamed big, and his father had served as a state representative.
After their family farm went bust, Lyndon’s dad struggled to pay off his crippling debt for much of the rest of his life. The result was that Lyndon never had much money growing up, not like all the rich folks in the big cities or the people he saw on TV. Most of his neighbors and friends didn’t have money, either. It all seemed so unfair.
Lyndon was never much of a student, but he did have the gift of gab and the rugged adventurism of the American Southwest. He once described himself to reporters as “a cross between a roughneck cowboy and a Baptist preacher.”
Johnson caught the political bug at an early age and pounced at the chance to serve as an aide to Congressman Richard Kleberg. He arrived at the U.S. capital in the 1930s at an exciting time in Washington, D.C.: a new president named Franklin D. Roosevelt had taken over the reins, and he just so happened to be Lyndon Johnson’s lifelong hero.
Johnson spent several years in Kleberg’s office getting a crash course in how to get things done—or not done—in Congress. The wheeling and dealing. The backslapping. The late-night heavy drinking. The fondling of the pretty young women who orbited every member of Congress.
He found all the trappings of the political world to be intoxicating, but he also knew that he could do his boss’s job ten times better. The only thing standing in his way was the small inconvenience of actually having to win an election.
After a failed attempt at a Georgetown University law degree, lightning struck. Johnson was plucked from obscurity and tapped by the Roosevelt administration to run the Texas division of the National Youth Administration (NYA), one of the dozens of “progressive” programs that Roosevelt promulgated in the 1930s.
Johnson was a true commissar at the NYA, a program that ostensibly provided “education, jobs, recreation, and counseling” for teens and young adults, as well as “financial assistance to students in exchange for part-time jobs as clerks or maintenance workers.” It sounds admirable, but in reality, it was a giant taxpayer-subsidized welfare program that created jobs that weren’t needed. The program also “put non-students to work on public projects such as highways and roadside parks, playgrounds and schools, recreational parks, and public buildings all over Texas.”
It was at the NYA that Johnson got his most effective training in how to squeeze the most largesse out of a government program—and how someone could use it to get large groups of people (e.g., demographic groups, industries, political factions) to do exactly what he wanted. Both of these lessons became key ingredients in Johnson’s future success.
In 1937, Johnson got his next big break when a vacancy occurred in the Tenth Congressional District of Texas. He ran for election in a large field of hopefuls as the most Roosevelt-infatuated candidate. “I support Franklin Roosevelt the full way,” he said. “All the way, every day. That’s what I intend to do when elected as your representative in Congress.”
Johnson’s campaign motto was “Franklin D. and Lyndon B.”—and he tied his own successful election directly to the president’s agenda. “This is not a personal triumph,” he said. “This is but approval of the president’s program . . . the people of the 10th district [of Texas] are sending to Washington the message that they are . . . as strong as horse radish for Roosevelt.”
During the time between 1937 and 1945, Johnson met with the president no fewer than twenty-th
ree times (at least officially; the unofficial number is likely significantly higher). And when Johnson was scolded for being Roosevelt’s “water boy” on Capitol Hill, he claimed he would “be glad to carry a bucket of water to the Commander in Chief any time his thirsty throat or his thirsty soul needed support.”
FDR was like a second father to Johnson, so Roosevelt’s death in 1945 left him devastated. “He was just like a daddy to me always,” Johnson said. “He always talked to me just that way. I don’t know that I’d ever have come to Congress if it hadn’t been for him. But I do know I got my first great desire for public office because of him.”
Once in the House, LBJ quickly became a protégé of Texas-born and all-powerful Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. From Rayburn, he learned how to wield absolute power, but, unlike “gentleman Sam,” Johnson was, for most of his adult life, a crude and grotesque monster. When you got past the suit and tie, LBJ was nothing more than a bully who threatened and intimidated people who didn’t agree with him, a sexual predator who would paw people right in front of his wife, and a graceless oaf who sometimes made staffers meet with him while he sat on the toilet.
Lady Bird Johnson was his long-suffering spouse; her husband’s philandering was not just notorious, it was legendary. Biographer Robert Dallek called Johnson a “competitive womanizer” and noted that “when people mentioned Kennedy’s many affairs, Johnson would bang the table and declare that he had more women by accident than Kennedy ever had on purpose.”
LBJ wasn’t even particularly discreet about his womanizing. At a NATO meeting in Paris in 1960, LBJ, Lady Bird, and others were having dinner. The vice president got drunk and ended up with a diplomat’s wife sitting in his lap, “groping” her. Lady Bird just had to deal with it. When he wasn’t cheating on her, he was treating her as if she was invisible in public, berating her, or speaking ill about her cooking, housekeeping, or clothes.
