Authors: James MacGregor Burns
A few days before, Landon had stood where the President was now standing, and had demanded that Roosevelt indicate his future course if re-elected. The President picked up the challenge but did so in his own terms. Again and again hitting the refrain “For all these we have only just begun to fight,” he said:
“This is our answer to those who, silent about their own plans, ask us to state our objectives.
“
Of course
we will continue to seek to improve working conditions for the workers of America.…
Of course
we will continue to work for cheaper electricity in the homes and on the farms of America.…
Of course
we will continue our efforts in behalf of the farmers of America.…
Of course
we will continue our efforts for young men and women … for the crippled, for the blind, for the mothers, our insurance for the unemployed, our security for the aged.
Of course
we will continue to protect the consumer … will continue our successful efforts to increase his purchasing power and to keep it constant.
“For these things, too, and for a multitude of things like them, we have only just begun to fight.…”
Reporters groped for words. The election results were a tidal wave, an earthquake, a landslide, the blizzard of ‘36. Roosevelt carried every state but Maine and Vermont. He won over Landon by 27,752,309 to 16,682,524 votes, the biggest popular plurality in history; his 523 to 8 ratio of electoral votes—exactly as predicted by Farley—was the biggest since 1820. He helped enlarge the already top-heavy Democratic margins in Congress. The new House would have 334 Democrats and 89 Republicans, against 321-104 before; sitting in the Senate would be 75 Democrats and only 17 Republicans, as compared to the old 70-23 ratio. If there had been a coattails effect, Roosevelt had the longer tails; Lehman in New York and Frank Murphy in Michigan had been urged to run to help the President; Roosevelt ran far ahead of both of them.
Roosevelt’s political reputation soared. Tumbling over one another, observers called him the master politician, the champion campaigner. What was the secret of his political sorcery? Some of his techniques were as old as politics itself; a few were new; all were invested with the deft Roosevelt touch. If categorized, they might go as follows.
Grasp of Public Opinion.
Roosevelt showed such a sure sense of popular moods and attitudes that some believed he had intuition or a sixth sense in this field. Actually, his understanding was rooted in solid, day-to-day accumulation of facts on what people were thinking. Roosevelt read half a dozen newspapers a day. He kept up a vast correspondence. Tens of thousands of letters came to the White House every week reporting people’s views and problems. He got some understanding from crowds—the way they looked, how they reacted to certain passages in his speeches. As President he enjoyed special advantages. Through favored journalists he could put up trial balloons and test public reaction. He had special voting polls conducted, and he often received advance information on other polls. Administrators in regional and state offices sent in a good deal of information, as did state and local party leaders. A huge division of press intelligence clipped hundreds of newspapers and compiled digests.
Timing
Roosevelt’s timing also seemed intuitive, but it too was largely calculated. Essential in his timing was the care he took not to confront his political opposition when it was mobilizing and moving hard and fast; he believed, for example, that presidents could expect to lose some popular support during congressional sessions, and that the President should wait until Congress adjourned before seizing the offensive again. Sometimes he moved fast, before
the opposition could mobilize. “I am like a cat,” Roosevelt said once. “I make a quick stroke and then I relax.” More often, he waited for the crest of the opposition wave to subside, then he acted. In the 1936 campaign he was under intense pressure from his political advisers to attack Landon when the Republican tide was running strong in early summer, but he refused. When he told Rosenman that tides turned quickly in politics, he was recognizing a shiftiness and moodiness in certain sectors of public opinion that have since been tested and proved in opinion and voting studies.
Attention to Political Detail.
Roosevelt showed infinite patience in dealing with the day-to-day routine of politics, involving in most cases the ambitions, hopes, and desire for recognition of countless politicians. The White House establishment was carefully organized for this purpose. A memo to Roosevelt during the campaign from one of his aides read:
Or take the case of David E. Fitzgerald, a Democratic leader in New Haven. In 1935 the White House sent him an autographed picture of the President. Fitzgerald traveled with Roosevelt’s entourage during the New England tour in 1936; his note of congratulations brought a “Dear Dave” reply from the President. Each of three Fitzgerald letters in 1940 was answered by a warm little note from Roosevelt; a postelection wire of congratulations brought a presidential letter in which “Dear Mr. Fitzgerald” was crossed out and “Dear Dave” substituted. When Fitzgerald caught cold campaigning, the White House sent him flowers. In 1941, another “Dear Dave” letter; a year later Fitzgerald died, and a warm presidential letter went to his widow, who replied, in a widow’s tremulous handwriting, “Mr. Fitzgerald was always an ardent admirer of yours.…”
Attention to Intragroup Factions.
The White House checked carefully on the political situation within groups, in order both to keep on friendly terms with all the factions and to avoid being compromised by some faction of politically suspect leanings. Splits among Negroes, Jews, labor groups, bankers, veterans, and the like were followed with care. Through administration officials who had longtime connections with national associations, the White House got deeply involved in the internal politics of some groups, but
always covertly. Pro-Roosevelt activities in the groups were often defensive, designed to offset opposing factions which might swing the formal association against the President during an election campaign.
Separating Opposition Leaders from Rank and File.
Splitting enemy leaders from their followers is an old political tactic, but few politicians have used it as persistently or as meticulously as Roosevelt. Almost invariably he attacked “Republican leaders” or “Republican spokesmen,” never the Republican party or Republicans generally. “There are thousands of people,” Roosevelt had said to Rosenman as far back as 1930, “who think as you and I do about government. They are enrolled as Republicans because their families have been Republicans for generations—that’s the only reason; some of them think it is
infra dig
to be called a Democrat; the Democrats in their village are not the socially ‘nice’ people the enrolled Republicans are. So never attack the Republicans or the Republican party—only the Republican
leaders.
Then any Republican voter who hears it will say to himself: ‘Well, he doesn’t mean me.…’”
Fighting on Your Own Battleground.
Offensively this meant attacking the opposition at its weakest point in an effort to force it to accept the gage of battle on the worst ground for it. Defensively it meant answering the opposition’s most extreme or absurd attacks. In 1930 Roosevelt ignored Republican charges against his handling of the New York City situation until almost the end of the campaign. In his Madison Square Garden speech in 1936 he skillfully converted Landon’s effort to put him on the defensive into a superb defense of the New Deal on his own terms.
Personal Charm and Political Craft.
No political technique is effective unless employed with skill in a given situation. Immensely strengthening all Roosevelt’s tactics were the calculated flattery he could use in winning over critics and the sheer astuteness with which he outmaneuvered rival leaders. An example of the latter was his handling of John L. Lewis’s campaign donation in 1936. The CIO chief came into Roosevelt’s office one day with a check for $250,000 and with a photographer to record the ceremony. Roosevelt was all smiles, but he would not take the check.
“No, John,” he said. “Just keep it, and I’ll call on you if and when any small need arises.”
Lewis left, grumbling that he had been outsmarted. He had been. During the next few weeks requests for money flowed in from Farley and from independent Roosevelt groups. In vain Lewis tried to stem the torrent by insisting on a written order from the President. Roosevelt backed up the requests with orders or with
telephone calls. In the end Lewis’s treasury was drained of almost half a million dollars—and without undue notice in the press.
Undeniably, the triumph was largely a personal victory for Roosevelt. “I am the issue,” he had said to Moley; and Farley had built his campaign around the Roosevelt personality. So the post-election huzzas were justifiably for Roosevelt, rather than for his party or even for his cause.
Drowned out by the applause were some misgivings about certain aspects of the election results. Roosevelt himself, according to one report, was disturbed by the shriveled Republican strength in House and Senate. Without strong party opposition, he foresaw that splits might more easily develop within the huge Democratic majorities as shifting factions fought with one another. Ickes said bluntly that the President had pulled through to victory men whose defeat would have been better for the country. On the other hand, Roosevelt was pleased with his own sweep. If Landon had gained over Hoover he feared that the “reactionary element” would exploit that fact during the next Congress.
The personal nature of the sweep had other implications. For one thing, it left in some obscurity the nature of the mandate the voters had given him. He had run mainly on the New Deal record; what was the New Deal future to be—a continuation of the present program, an enlargement, a shift in new directions? To be sure, Roosevelt in the eleventh hour of the campaign had uttered his magnificent “we-have-only-just-begun-to-fight” statement. Was this a bit of campaign oratory, or a pledge to an expanded New Deal?
Roosevelt’s victory, too, had been realized at some expense to the party that he headed. In several states the Democratic organization was left stranded, and in New York State the American Labor Party, composed largely of unionists suspicious of both major parties, boasted of the voters who had supported the President on its ticket. It was odd, and yet significant, that within a few days of the Democratic party nominee’s great victory, observers were predicting a party realignment, and possibly even a national labor party, by 1940.
Another aspect of the personal nature of Roosevelt’s victory was the ambiguity of the class groupings supporting him. In 1932 voters from all income classes had flocked to his standard out of their common deprivations during the Depression. Roosevelt’s fuzzy position on many issues that year had made it possible for his vote to cut across class lines. What had happened in 1936? Polling results suggested that a class cleavage had begun to divide the voters at a point about midway through the first term, and had widened considerably by 1936. But later studies were to show that the cleavage
in 1936 was not as sharp as some had supposed. This was due in part to the breadth of the President’s appeal—he won votes not only from the great majority of the poor, but from a surprising percentage of the better off too.
There is a rule of economy in politics. “The perfect party victory,” it has been said, “is to be won by accumulating a relatively narrow majority, the mark of the skillful conduct of politics.” To win a great majority of votes may involve such commitments as to make victory politically embarrassing. From such a standpoint Roosevelt’s landslide was political extravagance. Of course, he had not expected to win by such a sweep, and he did not have the benefit of hindsight. But much would depend on the decisions he made as he strove to govern with his top-heavy majority.
Such speculations as these, however, would have seemed academic indeed in November of 1936. Roosevelt was at the peak of his political form. When he sailed on the
Indianapolis
for a good-will tour to South America late that month, he left an America that was itself bursting with good will toward its leader. Rested by the trip and greeted by huge throngs in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, he was as captivating as ever.
He looked forward confidently and eagerly to his second term, which would start in January 1937 rather than March as a result of the passage of a constitutional amendment. All seemed well and calm at home—his only worry was the situation abroad. “… I still don’t like the European outlook,” he wrote Eleanor at the end of November.
W
AS IT AN OMEN
? The famous Roosevelt luck seemed to forsake the President on the January day in 1937 when he entered his second term. Bursts of cold rain soaked the gay inaugural decorations, furled the sodden flags around their staffs, and drenched dignitaries and spectators alike while they gathered below the Capitol rotunda. The rain drummed on the cellophane that covered Roosevelt’s old family Bible, as he stood with upraised hand facing Chief Justice Hughes.
They eyed each other, the old judge, his wet whiskers quivering in the wind, the resolute President, jaw stuck out. Hughes read the oath with slow and rising emphasis as he came to the words “promise to support the Constitution of the United States.” Roosevelt gave the words equal force as he repeated the oath. At this point, he said later, he wanted to cry out, “Yes, but it’s the Constitution as
I
understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy—not the kind of Constitution your Court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy.”