Roosevelt (21 page)

When the legislature handed him the amended budget the governor pondered for two weeks and then vetoed the whole $56,000,000 bill. He admitted that this was drastic action, but, he said, “Either the State must carry out the principles of the Executive Budget, which embody fifteen years of effort to place the affairs of the State on a modern efficient business basis, or we shall drift into a hopeless situation of divided responsibility for administration of executive functions.” Roosevelt resubmitted the bill in the same form as his first budget. The Republicans made the same changes and promptly adjourned. They were fortified in their position by a legal opinion from the attorney general, a Republican who by an election quirk had won office in 1928 and who now, of course, was siding with his fellow partisans in the legislature.

What could Roosevelt do now? His advisers were divided. Some felt that he had demanded a too rigid construction of the executive budget amendment, that he should now retire gracefully by signing the law, or call the legislature into what all knew would be a futile special session. Others held that he had a sound legal position and that he should submit the question to the courts. Roosevelt decided on the latter step. The Republicans chose as counsel none other than former Governor Nathan L. Miller, a Republican who had never been troubled by having to share power with the two finance chairmen, since, as Roosevelt commented privately, “the group of three constituted a little family tea party which Miller was able to dominate.” In June 1929 a decision of the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court sustained the legislature’s position, but several months later the Court of Appeals upheld the governor’s case on the major points.

Roosevelt had won the fight, but in a curiously un-Rooseveltian way. He had appealed to the courts rather than to the people, perhaps out of a conviction that the issues were too technical for
popular understanding or arousal. The position he had taken both in public and private—that he was fighting for “Constitutional Government, carrying out the original American theory of separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches”—was a remarkable stand for a politician who in Albany and later in Washington would try to bypass some of the ancient barriers between the three branches of government.

In any event, the budget fight was only a skirmish in a larger political battle that Roosevelt was not to win.

The trouble was that Roosevelt could find no way to overcome the stubborn fact that the legislature shared governmental power with him but mirrored a different pattern of political power. He tried the formula of nonpartisanship, but pious gestures could not wave away the realities of politicians’ conflicting loyalties and ambitions. He tried appealing to the people over the heads of the Republican leaders, but the latter gave enough ground to take the sting out of public resentment and then took up another obstructive position. He knew that he could carry his case to the voters in the 1930 election, but the Republicans would probably still retain their grip on the legislature. And always he labored under the difficulty that even the Empire State was not strong enough to cope with problems that were national or international in character. The fight over St. Lawrence power—an issue closer to Roosevelt’s heart than any other during his governorship—illustrated the intractable nature of the political stalemate.

After piling up in the Great Lakes water flows into the St. Lawrence River and then races down through a narrow gorge to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic. “In the brief time that I have been speaking to you,” Roosevelt said midway through his inaugural address, “there has run to waste on their paths toward the sea, enough power from our rivers to have turned the wheels of a thousand factories, to have lit a million farmers’ homes.…” Much of this unused power was spilling through the St. Lawrence. Roosevelt knew the background of the situation—how the legislature years before had given and then rescinded a free grant to a private company to develop the power of the Long Saulte Rapids, how Smith had conducted a long running battle over water power with the Republican leadership, how strongly represented the utility interests had always been in the Republican legislature. By 1929 the private power interests seemed as potent in New York Republican circles as before; H. Edmund Machold, the former speaker of the assembly and soon to be chairman of the Republican state
committee, was a partner of Floyd L. Carlisle, the “power baron” of northeastern New York, as his enemies called him.

Campaigning in central New York State, Candidate Roosevelt had solemnly preached “Thou shalt not steal” and proceeded to belabor the Republican leaders as schemers and thieves. Now Governor Roosevelt told the legislature that it was intolerable that the use of the “stupendous heritage” of water power should be longer delayed by “petty squabbles and partisan dispute.” The Republicans were not impressed. The next day, in his message to the legislature, the governor reiterated that the people’s control of their water power could not be alienated by long-term leases; then he looked up at his audience and added with a smile, “This is one of those questions on which I hope we can reach agreement.”

Skeptical laughter rippled through the assembly chamber. It was clear that agreement was impossible. But at least Roosevelt was able to define the central issue: How much should be done by the state in both developing and distributing electricity from the people’s water power, and how much by private enterprise?

What was Roosevelt’s answer to the question? He had no detailed program when he came to office, but he learned quickly. He learned mainly from experts in the field. Leland Olds, a student of utility regulation, was one of those invited to the executive mansion. He arrived on a late afternoon in February and got a warm welcome from the governor. Olds watched Roosevelt and Rosenman splash in a heated pool built in an old hothouse behind the mansion, sat wonderingly during dinner while every subject except the business at hand was batted briskly around the table. After dinner Roosevelt reminisced about Hyde Park history and the farmers in Dutchess County who could not get electricity. Then came questions to Olds until after midnight—long, searching questions about accounting methods, the valuation theory, court decisions, a people’s counsel for rate cases. Watching these proceedings, Rosenman felt that the governor had exhausted both Olds and the subject.

By March 1929 Roosevelt was ready with a plan for the St. Lawrence. The power should be developed by the state, he said, but transmitted and distributed by private enterprise. The rub lay in the rates charged by the companies. Rate regulation by the state Public Service Commission, Roosevelt told the legislature, had become ineffective, largely because the courts had allowed high profits based on inflated valuations. Frankly proposing the theory of contract rather than the theory of regulation, he urged that the state be authorized to make contracts with transmitting and distributing companies, “under which a fair price to the consumer will be guaranteed, this price to make allowances only for a fair return to the companies on the actual capital invested in the transmitting and
distributing of this particular power energy.” This proposal was a departure from Smith’s reliance on rate regulation by the Public Service Commission.

Roosevelt’s only specific request of the legislature was for the creation of a body to submit a specific plan for St. Lawrence development to the lawmakers. To give the bills a bipartisan character the governor asked the Republican leaders to introduce them, but they refused to do this or even to let the Democrats bring the bills on the floor. The 1929 session ended with the measures quietly stifled in committee.

The next session saw a different outcome, largely because 1930 was an election year. Roosevelt had asked Howe to get comparative bills for New Yorkers using private power and Canadians using publicly developed electricity, and he was ready to use the findings in his fight with the utilities. The opposition was divided; W. Kingsland Macy, a rising young Republican leader in Suffolk County, demanded the resignation of the new head of the state Republican committee, an associate of former chairman Machold, on the ground that it was issues like water power that the “party is licked on.” In January 1930 the water power bill was introduced in the legislature along the lines Roosevelt had asked. “A complete triumph,” Walter Lippmann wrote the governor.

But this was only a first step. During late 1930 the St. Lawrence Power Development Commission appointed by the governor made a study of the situation, and Roosevelt kept the issue alive in his re-election campaign. The report of the commission in January 1931 was highly favorable to the project from both the engineering and financial standpoints. The commission majority followed Roosevelt’s previous stand on state development of the power and private distribution through the contract method. Two months later a bill was introduced embodying these recommendations.

Then another altercation flared up—and once again it was over the power of the governor and legislature. Senator John Knight, Republican leader of the senate, introduced an amendment canceling the right of the governor to appoint the members of the power authority, and specifying five individuals by name. Roosevelt was indignant. He had warned the Republican leaders in a conference that he would not accept such a provision; he was forced to the conclusion, he announced, that the Republicans were trying to insure a veto. Power development, he said, fell under the governor’s powers—“Executive responsibility must be armed with Executive authority.” Both sides knew that the right to name the new authority meant control over the actual use of the vast power of the St. Lawrence.

Roosevelt’s tactic was a direct appeal to the people. He
dramatized the Republican move as a play by the utilities to balk the people’s development of their own power. He announced his plan to go on the air a few days later, but just before the scheduled talk Knight and his followers surrendered. The governor used his radio time to sermonize that the influence of “Mr. and Mrs. Average Voter” was stronger than that of private corporations and a handful of political leaders.

Perhaps it was. Yet even with the bill finally passed and a Roosevelt-minded power authority appointed, the whole project was to fail. For now it ran into a configuration of stubborn facts—the fact that only the national government could make a treaty with Canada involving the St. Lawrence, the fact that President Hoover was sensitive to the opposition of private power and railroad interests, the fact that by late 1931 Roosevelt was already emerging as Hoover’s likely opponent the following year. A week after Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination in July 1932 he asked for a conference with Hoover to discuss, prior to completion of negotiations with Canada, New York’s share of the cost of development. In a sullen reply Hoover said that it would not “be necessary for you to interrupt your cruise by a visit to Washington.”

As it turned out, more than a quarter-century was to pass before the swift-running waters of the St. Lawrence would light the homes and run the separators for the farmers of northern New York.

The flaccid hand of stalemate lay over all Roosevelt’s major programs during his governorship. The legislature’s response to his proposals wavered near a point of unstable equilibrium between the dislike of the rural-based legislators for Roosevelt’s progressive recommendations and their fear of writing a record of negation and obstruction on which the next Republican statewide ticket would ride to defeat. Since for the most part they had little fear for their own seats and their concern for the ticket was not profound, the point of equilibrium was much nearer do-nothingism than action. And if Roosevelt somehow spurred the legislature to legislate, he confronted the bleak fact that even the Empire State was still but one of forty-eight, and its legal and material powers were sharply circumscribed.

Do-nothing government had become a far more critical problem during Roosevelt’s second year of office than ever before, for in that year the Depression began to bite deep into the flesh and bone of the state’s economy. Production dwindled, prices shrank, wages declined, farm income fell off sharply. New York City’s Bank of the United States collapsed in the largest bank failure in American history. Thousands of jobless were soon walking the streets. As income from taxes diminished, the state’s responsibility to prevent
suffering increased. So did the need for drastic action—but the need ran head on into the stalemate in Albany.

Farm policy was a case in point. Roosevelt knew the plight of the farmers, who had suffered eight years of high industrial prices and somewhat depressed agricultural markets even before the advent of the Great Depression. He knew, too, that the difficulties were deep-reaching, involving factors of supply and demand, middlemen’s costs and profits, tariffs, farm abandonments, urbanization, and others. “The ultimate goal,” he said in his annual message to the legislature in 1929, “is that the farmer and his family shall be put on the same level of earning capacity as his fellow American who lives in the city.” He understood specific aspects of agricultural economics—transportation costs, the national interrelationships of farming, the tendency of milksheds to cut across state lines, land misuse, the haphazard planlessness of much farm production and marketing.

His speeches impressed farmers and farm politicians outside New York State as well as inside. “We thought you were acquainted only with Wall Street magnates,” wrote a Wisconsin official after Roosevelt had described vividly the gap between the prices farmers got and the prices consumers paid.

But the actual legislation passed was almost trifling compared with the immensity of the problem. More state aid for highway construction, for snow removal, for grade crossing elimination, and for agricultural research met some of the farmers’ specific complaints but hardly changed the economic dimensions of their lives. As the Depression deepened in 1930 and 1931 more basic measures were adopted, such as a bill providing more credit facilities for crop production. The obstacle to more drastic action did not lie mainly with the legislature, which was fairly responsive to farm needs and anxious to stop the governor from capturing farm leadership. It lay in the iron fact that a single state could not cope with a national situation.