Roosevelt (38 page)

After a few minutes the Senator admitted defeat. He took his hat off and kept it off; shortly afterward he made his departure. Outside the White House he said to Farley: “What the hell is the use of coming down to see this fellow? I can’t win any decision over him.” It was the last meeting between Roosevelt and Long. Within a few months the Louisianian had started total war against the administration.

Long had emerged from a background almost the antithesis of Roosevelt’s. Winn Parish in northern Louisiana, where he had been born in a log cabin in 1893, was a land of scrawny cattle, harvests, and people, a spawning ground of political protest. Vocal and energetic from the start, Huey ran away at ten, tried his hand at auctioneering, helping in a printer’s office, peddling books, selling a cooking compound and medicines for “women’s sickness,” went through the three-year law course at Tulane in eight months, and got a special examination from a Louisiana court to enter the bar at twenty-one. He “came out of that courtroom running for office.”

June 84, 1934, C. K. Berryman, Washington
Star

Run for office he did—and much more. Unlike most Louisiana politicians, Huey tried fresh techniques. He attacked the big corporations and seemed to mean it, he outfought the political old guard, and he came through on his promises of free schoolbooks, better roads and hospitals, more public works. He won the governorship in 1928 after a cyclonic campaign, stood off a move to impeach him, and crushed the opposition. His “theory of democracy” was simple. “A leader gets up a program and then he goes out and explains it, patiently and more patiently, until they get it,” he said. And if he wins office, “he don’t tolerate no opposition from the old-gang politicians, the legislatures, the courts, the corporations or anybody.” Huey didn’t, and in a few years he made Louisiana his fiefdom.

With his base increasingly secure, Huey roamed into wider fields. Elected Senator in 1930, he had found the perfect national forum. In the Senate, he thumped august senatorial backs, lambasted “Prince Franklin, Knight of the Nourmahal” [a yacht owned by Vincent Astor that Roosevelt occasionally used], “Lord Corn Wallace,” “Chicago Chinch Bug” Ickes, accused Farley of profiteering, and turned the Senate Office Building into national headquarters for his Share-Our-Wealth movement. If the means were vague, the goals were definite and glowing: free homesteads and education, cheap food, veterans bonuses, a limitation of fortunes, a minimum
annual income of two thousand dollars. Every man a king, and Huey the kingfish.

Bragging that he would go to the White House in 1936, or at the latest in 1940, Long cast about for allies, and other leaders loomed as possible auxiliaries of the Louisianian. One of these was Father Coughlin, of Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb. A burly young man with a smooth face and a smoother tongue, Coughlin had had the wit late in the ‘twenties to turn to his natural instrument, the radio. He had met with phenomenal success. One of his denunciations of “Hoover prosperity” had brought a million letters; he averaged eighty thousand a week. When his 150 assistants opened the mail, money would tumble out—up to half a million dollars a year, it was said.

For a time Coughlin strongly supported Roosevelt. “The New Deal is Christ’s Deal,” he proclaimed, and the two men had exchanged friendly letters. When Coughlin solicited a naval appointment for a priest in September 1934, the President interceded with the Navy Department. But Coughlin’s program went far beyond Roosevelt’s. He wanted currency inflation, a “living annual wage,” nationalization of banking, currency, and national resources. His relations with Roosevelt suddenly turned cold in 1934, perhaps because his leading backer was discovered by the administration to be a big operator in foreign exchange. The voice from the Shrine of the Little Flower, first low and solemn, then keening high and plaintive, was soon lumping Roosevelt with the “godless capitalists, the Jews, communists, international bankers, and plutocrats.”

Meanwhile a third figure loomed on the western horizon—a lean, bespectacled oldster named Dr. Francis E. Townsend. A former city health officer, almost destitute himself, Townsend had absorbed some of the economic panaceas floating around California. He was brooding over the plight of himself and his generation when—so the story went—he looked out his bathroom window one morning and saw three old women rummaging in a garbage pail for scraps to eat. From that moment the old man’s crusade was on. He came up with a plan that—to old people at least—was spine-tingling in its sweep and simplicity. Everyone sixty or over would get a monthly pension of two hundred dollars provided—and what a wonderful proviso it was—that he spent his money within thirty days. Financed by a “transactions tax” the vast forced spending would invigorate the whole economy.

The truth about Townsend soon blended inseparably with legend, but the context of the movement was clear. America’s population was aging; the old rural family sheltering aunts and uncles and grandparents was declining; the self-sufficient community was disappearing. Etched deep on the faces of the old people who crowded
around the doctor was the pitiless story of a generation: complicated machines that had thrown them out of factories, new routines that had eluded them, perhaps a long trek westward to the end of the line—and finally the Great Depression, casually breaking several million old people on the economic wheel.

The Townsend movement mushroomed with startling speed. In September 1933—seven months after Roosevelt’s New Deal started—the doctor sent his plan to a local newspaper; within a year a thousand or more Townsend clubs were organized. Another thousand or so were set up in early 1935. As the New Deal honeymoon waned the cause seemed to be gaining momentum. Striking deep roots in the subsoil of discontent, it had the indispensable material for a protest movement: a leader who symbolized the cause; a strongly religious twist to the appeal; a concrete program directly related to old people’s needs and indigenous to the “American way of life,” scorning radical and “unChristian” methods.

Roosevelt’s friends were alarmed by the burgeoning power of the agitators. Report after report came to the White House of huge mass meetings aroused by anti-Roosevelt speeches. There was talk, Colonel House warned the President, that Long could do to him what Theodore Roosevelt had done to Taft in 1912. Even Howe got worried after Dan Tobin of the teamsters union reported that members—“decent and honest fellows” too—were asking if they should form Share-Our-Wealth clubs. Stanley High, a White House assistant, returned from the West with gloomy reports in August 1935. The Townsend movement was vital and fast-moving, he warned the White House; it was his guess that the biggest mistake in 1936 would be made by those who thought Townsend could be laughed off.

Guesswork was one thing; factual reports something else. Alarmed by Long’s activities, Farley asked the National Democratic Committee’s statistician, Emil Hurja, to make a secret poll of Long’s national strength. Hurja’s findings were disquieting. The Kingfish had drawn from the President sizable sections of his 1932 vote. Long’s strength was not restricted to Louisiana and a few nearby states; he had surprising support across the nation—enough, possibly, to tip the balance toward Republicans in 1936 elections. To make matters worse, he was openly threatening to “get” some of his foes in the Senate. This threat had a sharp edge to it. In 1932 Long had invaded Arkansas in a whirlwind, circus-like campaign to help Hattie Caraway succeed to her late husband’s Senate seat—“one poor little widow woman against six big-bellied bullies,” he said—and Hattie had won more votes than her six opponents combined.

How would Roosevelt respond to the little foxes? He followed
closely the activities of Long & Co., but he was not unduly alarmed. He seemed more concerned that the Republicans—especially progressive Republicans like La Follette and Nye—might fish in troubled waters, resulting in both a progressive Republican ticket and a Long ticket in 1936. “There is no question that it is all a dangerous situation,” the President wrote House, “but when it comes to Show-down these fellows cannot all lie in the same bed and will fight among themselves with almost absolute certainty.”

Roosevelt quickly discerned a critical weakness of the protest movements: their timing. It was better, he wrote House, to have the “free side-show” in 1935 than the next year, when the main performance would start. When Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson’s biographer, urged him in March 1935 to keep before the country a vision of high moral purpose, Roosevelt demurred. Public psychology, he said, “cannot, because of human weakness, be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note in the scale.” Wilson had stirred moral convictions, but he had lacked T.R.’s power to arouse people to enthusiasm over specific events.

“There is another thought which is involved in continuous leadership,” the President went on. People “tire of seeing the same name day after day in the important headlines of the papers, and the same voice night after night over the radio. For example, if since last November I had tried to keep up the pace of 1933 and 1934, the inevitable histrionics of the new actors, Long and Coughlin and Johnson, would have turned the eyes of the audience away from the main drama itself!” But Roosevelt agreed that the time would come for a “new stimulation of united American action,” and he would be ready.

But that time was not yet. Roosevelt’s way of dealing with rival leaders meanwhile was not to try to steal their ideological thunder, but to outmaneuver them in some close and tricky infighting.

His attack against Long was of this order. Patronage was doled out to the enemies of the Kingfish in Louisiana, and his supporters holding non-civil service jobs were fired. Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi politician who had been given a job by the administration, was assigned the task of warding off Long’s forays against neighboring senators. In August 1935, after an administration friend had won a primary election in Mississippi, Bilbo wired Roosevelt that the first treatment had been administered “that madman Huey Long” and more would follow. “I am watching your smoke,” Roosevelt answered enthusiastically. Federal agents roamed Louisiana checking the financial affairs of Long and his gang.

Coughlin, too, felt the stiletto rather than the rapier. The last thing Roosevelt wanted was a head-on encounter with the priest;
he was upset when cabinet members spoke up against Coughlin. The President preferred to work under cover against the priest through prominent Catholics such as Frank Murphy, ex-mayor of Detroit, and administration friends in the hierarchy and in Catholic laymen’s organizations. An elaborate study was submitted to Roosevelt of Coughlin’s broadcasting network, and Farley checked on postal receipts at the Royal Oak post office as a measure of the response to one of the priest’s appeals for funds. The White House had a hopeful report from Cardinal O’Connell in Boston that the Father was to be called to Rome to head the American College there, but nothing came of this.

If much of this maneuvering was ineffective, Roosevelt did not seem to be concerned. He could wait. To many of the inner circle during the early months of 1935, however, the administration seemed to be drifting and the President losing ground politically.

On the labor front, too, the New Deal unleashed surging and dynamic forces. Probably Roosevelt never fully understood these new forces or the new leaders they lifted to power. Certainly he had little conscious role in bringing about social and legislative changes that were to recast radically the structure of political power in the 1930’s.

The Depression had sapped the morale and strength of organized labor. Union membership, which had slowly fallen off during the 1920’s, sank deep after 1930 as workers lost jobs and as a huge reservoir of unemployed made the strike a feeble and often suicidal weapon. The more cautious union leaders tried to batten down the hatches as the industrial storms blew. Sporadic strikes of desperation swept bituminous coal and textile centers, but they were poorly organized and usually ebbed away amid shootings, arrests, terrorism, aimless destruction. By early March 1933 the relative strength of organized labor was about what it had been a quarter-century before.

Quite unwittingly the new President acted as midwife in the rebirth of labor action. The Rooseveltian militance and exuberance of the Hundred Days aroused workers just as they aroused the rest of the population. But even more decisive was a little provision in the NRA act, Section 7a, which provided that “employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives.…” Neither Roosevelt nor Miss Perkins had much to do with this provision.
Framed mainly by congressmen and labor leaders, it was simply part of a bargain under which labor joined the NRA’s great “concert of interests.” Moreover, the provision opened up a Pandora’s box of complexity and ambiguity; lawyers argued endlessly over its interpretation.