Roosevelt (47 page)

“What an unfortunate and terrible catastrophe in Spain!” Roosevelt wrote Ambassador Claude Bowers. But United States neutrality, he added, would be “complete.” Britain and France forbade their citizens to sell arms to the Spanish government; Hull put a moral embargo on American exports, although the Neutrality Act did not apply to civil war. Italy and Germany agreed not to intervene, and kept on intervening.

In the fall of 1936 Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact. The Axis could now forge strategic plans of united action. The democracies, divided and irresolute, were hamstrung by isolationists and appeasers in strategic positions. The West was still floundering.

The record is clear. As a foreign policy maker, Roosevelt during his first term was more pussyfooting politician than political leader. He seemed to float almost helplessly on the flood tide of isolationism, rather than to seek to change both the popular attitudes and the apathy that buttressed the isolationists’ strength.

He hoped that people would be educated by events; the error of this policy was that the dire events in Europe and Asia confirmed the American suspicion and fear of foreign involvement rather than prodding them into awareness of the need for collective action by the democracies. In short, a decisive act of interpretation was required, but Roosevelt did not interpret. At a minimum he might have avoided the isolationist line about keeping clear of joint action with other nations. Yet at a crucial moment—when he approved the Neutrality Act shortly before Italy’s attack on Ethiopia—he talked about co-operating with other nations “without entanglement.”

The awful implications of this policy of drift would become clear later on when Roosevelt sought to regain control of foreign policy making at home as the forces of aggression mounted abroad. But the immediate question is: Why did Roosevelt allow himself to be virtually immobilized by isolationist feeling? Why did he not, through words or action, seek to change popular attitudes and thus rechannel the pressures working on him?

The enigma deepens when Roosevelt’s private views are considered. In his private role he was an internationalist. He believed, that is, in the proposition that America’s security lay essentially in removing the economic and social causes of war and, if war threatened, in uniting the democracies, America included, against aggressive nations. But in his public role he talked about keeping America disentangled from the political affairs of other nations; he often talked, in short, like an isolationist.

The mystery deepens still further when one considers that the President had emphatic, though perhaps ill-defined, ideas about the need for leadership in a democracy. He must have recognized the potential in leadership when, in addressing the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at the end of 1933, he asserted roundly that the “blame for the danger to world peace lies not in the world population but in the political leaders of the population.” At the same time he was concerned about the perennially weak leadership that the politicians gave France. He was perhaps aware, too, that simply following a line of policy lying at the mean between two extremes would not necessarily lead to the wisest course. In the case of Ethiopia, for
instance, the British and French through their indecisive maneuverings succeeded neither in keeping Mussolini out of Germany’s orbit nor in vindicating the ideals of collective security. Washington’s foreign policies were equally muddled.

The reasons for the sharp divergence between Roosevelt’s private and public roles in foreign policy making were several. In the first place, the President’s party was cleft through the middle on international issues. The internationalist wing centered in the southern and border states was balanced by isolationists rooted in the West and Midwest. To win the nomination Roosevelt had given hostages to both groups. Part of the price of success in 1932 had been categorical opposition to United States co-operation with the collective security efforts of the League, and a cautious policy of neutrality based on nonentanglement. In the second place, Roosevelt in his campaign had so ignored foreign policy, or fuzzed the issue over when he did touch on it, that he had failed to establish popular attitudes on foreign policy that he could later evoke in support of internationalism. Moreover, during his first term the President gave first priority to domestic policies; a strong line on foreign affairs might have alienated the large number of isolationist congressmen who were supporting the New Deal. Indeed, many isolationists seemed to believe that any marked interest in foreign affairs by the President was virtually a betrayal of progressivism.

In addition, the President had surrounded himself with men from both sides. Men like Hull and Howe and Morgenthau were generally on the international end of the spectrum, but others like Moley and Hopkins and Hugh Johnson and Ickes were at the opposite end. Ickes had been so pleased by the Senate action on the World Court that he had telephoned and congratulated Hiram Johnson, whom he found “as happy as a boy.” The development of the New Deal’s policies of economic nationalism, tinged with the rhetoric of international good will and economic co-operation, resulted from and reinforced this division.

But the main reason for Roosevelt’s caution involved the future rather than the past. The election of 1936 was approaching, and at this point he was not willing to take needless risks. It was significant that after he and Mackenzie King had signed a trade agreement in Washington—and a rather moderate one at that—Roosevelt wrote to King in April 1936 that “in a sense, we both took our political lives in our hands.…” The immediate goal of re-election was the supreme goal; the tasks of leadership, he hoped, could be picked up later.

S
TUDYING THE RULERS
of foreign lands, Anne O’Hare McCormick of the New York
Times
found that they had shriveled or aged during these tortured years. “On the faces of Mussolini, Hitler, Stanley Baldwin, even the rotating governors of France,” she reported, “strain and worry have etched indelible lines. Caught off guard, when they are alone, they are tired and baffled men who have paid a heavy price for power.”

Not so Roosevelt. Home again, Mrs. McCormick marveled that he was so little shaken by the seismic disturbances over which he presided. “On none of his predecessors has the office left so few marks as on Mr. Roosevelt. He is a little heavier, a shade grayer; otherwise he looks harder and in better health than on the day of his inauguration. His face is so tanned that his eyes appear lighter, a cool Wedgwood blue; after the four grilling years since the last campaign, they are as keen, curious, friendly, and impenetrable as ever.”

If other leaders bent under the burdens of power, Roosevelt shouldered his with zest and gaiety. He loved being President; he almost always gave the impression of being on top of his job. Cheerfully, exuberantly, he swung through the varied presidential tasks: dictating to Miss Tully pithy, twinkling little notes for friends and subordinates; splashing in the White House pool for the delighted photographers; showing off the incredible gewgaws that littered his desk; greeting delegations of Indians, of Boy Scouts, of businessmen, of Moose, of 4-H Club leaders, of Democratic ladies; relating long anecdotes about his ancestors to luncheon guests; scratching his name on bills with a dozen pens and carefully awarding each to a congressional sponsor solemnly standing behind the President’s big chair; conferring genially with congressional leaders, agency heads, party leaders, foreign emissaries; poking fun at reporters while deftly turning aside their questions.

The variegated facets of the presidential job called for a multitude of different roles, and Roosevelt moved from part to part with ease and confidence. He was a man of many faces. Presiding over
meetings of chiefs of his emergency agencies, he was the brisk administrator investing the sprawling bureaucracy with pace and direction, and patiently educating his subordinates on the
Realpolitik
of administrative management. Entertaining visitors on a yacht, he was the quintessence of sociableness and charm. Addressing a party meeting, he was the militant political leader, trenchant, commanding, cocky, assertive. Motoring through the woods at Hyde Park, he was the country squire, relaxed, casual, rustic. Attending Harvard’s tercentenary in top hat and morning coat, he was the chief of state, august, sedate, and solemn.

Watching the President perform at a press conference midway through the first term, John Gunther was struck by the incredible swiftness with which he struck a series of almost theatrical poses. In twenty minutes, Gunther noted, Roosevelt’s features expressed amazement, curiosity, mock alarm, genuine interest, worry, rhetorical playing for suspense, sympathy, decision, playfulness, dignity, and surpassing charm. And when the reporters roared at Roosevelt’s remarks, he was clearly pleased at this audience response; after one such burst of laughter, the President took a sort of bow with a tilt of his huge head.

In all these roles Roosevelt gave an impression of directness and simplicity, and winning qualities these were. Ushered into the presidential bedroom one morning, Ickes found him shaving in the adjoining bathroom. Roosevelt invited him to sit on the toilet seat while they talked; the President was then wheeled to his bed where he reclined, still talking, while being dressed. He had his braces put on to greet a delegation, then returned to his room to take his braces off and relax again. “I was struck all over again,” Ickes exclaimed that night, “with the unaffected simplicity and charm of the man.” But this apparent simplicity was most deceiving—as Ickes himself was to discover.

The staff, as the last year of the first term arrived, reflected some of the change in Roosevelt’s political posture and in the alignment of forces amid which he operated. Howe had died in April, until the end toying with great schemes for Roosevelt’s triumphant re-election. Douglas, Acheson, and most of the other conservatives had long since left. By 1936 only Moley remained from the right wing of the original brain trust—and the graying, anxious professor was not to stay long. For months he had watched with rising alarm as the New Deal veered left. In turn captivated by Roosevelt’s charm and pained by his policies, Moley somehow stayed on until a night in June when the President in a small gathering began taunting him about his new conservatism. Moley replied with heat, an angry quarrel followed, and the old relationship was over.

New faces in the White House took the place of old. There was
Stanley High, a smooth-mannered, bespectacled young man whose religious background helped him supply the President with what his more irreverent White House aides called “inspirational messages.” There was Tommy Corcoran, a brash, engaging lawyer, only thirty-six years old, whose role as White House court jester with his jokes, Irish ballads, and mimicry seemed to belie his growing reputation as a tough-minded puller of governmental wires and manipulator of politicians and bureaucrats. There was Corcoran’s “Gold Dust twin,” Ben Cohen, a dreamy intellectual who had shown brilliant powers in drafting New Deal bills and coping with legal technicalities. Others fluttered in and out of the White House limelight: Robert H. Jackson, William O. Douglas, Isador Lubin—militant legal and economic technicians of a changing social order.

The President steered his kitchen cabinet with an easy rein. Its members in fact made up his staff for legislative, propaganda, and election campaigns, but he never institutionalized it. He casually borrowed personnel from agencies as he needed them. Presidential business was carried on in a catch-as-catch-can turmoil of personal conferences, sudden telephone calls, handwritten chits circulated among key advisers. The most valuable member of the kitchen cabinet was still Eleanor Roosevelt, who not only reached millions of people with her endless trips and with a newspaper column on “My Day,” but continued to bring a stream of new faces and new ideas into the White House.

Yet to single out even this half-dozen or so White House personalities is to risk underestimating the vital role that the others in the executive establishment would play in 1936. For, as convention and election time approached, it became clear that Roosevelt would campaign squarely on the basis of the new benefits and the new hope that the New Deal administrators and their alphabetical agencies had brought to America.

Perhaps it was Roosevelt’s grasp of the cardinal fact of New Deal benefits to the people that largely explains his optimism about re-election. “We will win easily next year,” he told his cabinet in November 1935, “but we are going to make it a crusade.” His steady optimism continued into the early months of 1936. And well it might. For the New Deal program, partly by design and partly by chance, was coming to a climax in the election year.

By almost any test the economic surge since 1932 had been remarkable. Unemployment had dropped by about four million since the low point early in 1933; at least six million jobs had been created. Pay rolls in manufacturing industries had doubled since
1932; stock prices had more than doubled. Commercial and industrial failures in 1936 were one-third what they had been four years before. Total cash income of farmers had fallen to four billion in 1932 and recovered to almost seven billion in 1935. Capital issues had shot up sixfold since 1933. The physical volume of industrial production had almost doubled.

When the President wrote to agency heads in 1936 asking them for detailed lists of their achievements that could be used in his campaign, the responses underlined the central part that the New Deal had played in this upsurge. In three years federal and other relief agencies had poured over five billion dollars into work projects and related relief activities. Another four billion had gone into public works: roads, dams, sewage systems, public buildings, and the like. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration was supplying a substantial chunk of farm income through its direct benefit and rental payments. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a major carry-over from the Hoover administration, had stepped up its huge lending operations.