No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

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  The America over which Roosevelt presided in 1940 was in its eleventh year of depression. No decline in American history had been so deep, so lasting, so far-reaching. “The great knife of the depression,” wrote Robert S. and Helen Merrill Lynd in their classic study, Middletown in Transition, “had cut down impartially through the entire population, cleaving open lives and hopes of rich as well as poor. The experience had been more nearly universal than any prolonged recent emotional experience in [America’s] history. It had approached in its elemental shock the primary experiences of birth and death.”

  To be sure, the worst days were over—the days when breadlines and soup kitchens were forming in every city, when evicted families were shivering in makeshift tents in the dead of winter and jobless men were bivouacking around wood fires at the railroad tracks. The massive relief programs of the New Deal had stopped the precipitous slide of the first three and a half years, providing an economic floor for tens of millions of Americans.

  But the economy had not yet recovered; business was still not producing well enough on its own to silence the growing doubts about capitalism and democracy. Almost ten million Americans, 17 percent of the work force, were without jobs; about two and a half million found their only source of income in government programs. Of those who worked, one-half of the men and two-thirds of the women earned less than $1,000 a year. Only forty-eight thousand taxpayers in a population of 132 million earned more than $2,500 a year.

  In his second inaugural, Roosevelt had proclaimed that he saw “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” On this spring day three years later, he could still see abundant evidence of serious deprivation. Thirty-one percent of thirty-five million dwelling units did not have running water; 32 percent had no indoor toilet; 39 percent lacked a bathtub or shower; 58 percent had no central heating. Of seventy-four million Americans twenty-five years old or older, only two of five had gone beyond eighth grade; one of four had graduated from high school; one of twenty had completed college.

  Though equal opportunity in a classless society still dominated the rhetoric of the day, the reality was a pyramidal society, a fortunate few at the top and the great mass of citizens stuck at the bottom with few opportunities to move upward on the economic ladder. America was then a predominantly small-town nation, with the majority of citizens living in towns of fewer than twenty-five thousand people. Within these towns, as in the neighborhoods of larger cities, society was stratified along class, racial, and ethnic lines.

  “Class membership,” historian Richard Polenberg has written of this period, “determined virtually every aspect of an individual’s life: the subjects one studied in high school, the church one attended, the person one married, the clubs one joined, the magazines one read, the doctor one visited, the way one was treated by the law, and even the choice of an undertaker.”

  The American nation had been formed by the continual movement of people from Europe to the New World and then across a hostile continent in a restless, unflagging quest for new opportunity. But now, with the Western frontier closed and every section of America afflicted by depression, most Americans seemed frozen in place, rarely venturing to cross the lines of their county, much less their state.

  To be sure, the New Deal, particularly in its exhilarating early days, had profoundly altered the relationship between the government and the people, giving the state final responsibility for the well-being of its citizens. Rejecting the traditional notion that government was the handmaiden of business, the New Deal Congress had enacted an unprecedented series of laws which regulated the securities market, established a minimum wage, originated a new system of social security, guaranteed labor’s right to collective bargaining, and established control over the nation’s money supply. “It is hard to think of another period in the whole history of the republic that was so fruitful,” historian William Leuchtenberg has written, “or of a crisis that was met with as much imagination.”

  But by 1940, the New Deal revolution had sputtered to an end. The country was weary of reform, and Congress was in full rebellion against the administration’s domestic agenda. A bipartisan coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans had seized the initiative, crushing the president’s housing program, slashing appropriations for relief, killing the federal theater project, and eliminating the administration’s undistributed-profits tax.

  To complicate the situation further, the president’s enemies on domestic issues were his friends in foreign policy, and vice versa. Since 1939, most conservative Democrats had supported the president’s moves to aid the Allies, while many liberals and Midwestern progressives, fearing that the pull toward war would bring an end to social reform, had joined the isolationist cause.

  For the president, there was perhaps additional anxiety in the recognition that the end of the “phony war” defined the beginning of a new presidency for him, one that would be judged by different standards. Roosevelt’s old hero Woodrow Wilson was a painful memory in this regard. Wilson, too, had been cheered as never before on that April day in 1917 when he had come to Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. Yet, two years later, after his bruising battle with the Senate over the League of Nations, the cheers had turned to jeers, and his presidency had been destroyed.

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  The leadership of the House and Senate—Speaker William Bankhead, House Majority Leader Sam Rayburn, and Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley—sat behind the president on a marble dais, facing the semicircular rows of seats. In the front row sat the Cabinet—Secretary Woodring gripping the edge of his chair, Secretary Hull holding his chin in his hand, Harry Hopkins slumped in a tense silence. Across the chamber, buddy poppies could be seen on hundreds of lapels, a tribute to the soldiers of World War I who had fought on Flanders Field.

  “These are ominous days,” the President began in a low, solemn tone, facing a battery of microphones that would carry his words to the world, “days whose swift and shocking developments force every neutral nation to look to its defenses in the light of new factors . . . . No old defense is so strong that it requires no further strengthening and no attack is so unlikely or impossible that it may be ignored.”

  Nearly a third of the president’s address was devoted to a skillful schoolmasterly description of the flying times from Greenland, the Azores, and the Caribbean Islands to key American cities, to show that, in an age of air warfare, despite the claims of the isolationists, the natural barriers of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans no longer afforded the same protection they had in the past. Deriving strength from the positive reaction to his words, Roosevelt’s voice swelled as he warned that Nazi Germany not only had more planes than all its opponents combined, but appeared to have a weekly productive capacity that was far greater than that of its opponents.

  How could America respond to this alarming situation? Roosevelt’s answer was bold. He asked for appropriations to recruit an additional half-million men for the army, to purchase guns and equipment, to build modern tanks, and to construct naval ships. Then he made a dramatic call for a staggering productive capacity of fifty thousand planes a year, which would in only twelve months put America ahead of Germany, creating an aerial armada second to none in the world. How Roosevelt arrived at the fifty-thousand figure, way beyond the best hopes of his army and navy combined, is still not clear. Some say the giant number—more than ten times the current capacity—was put forth in a conversation with newspaper owner Lord Beaverbrook; others point to a conversation with Secretary Hull. Whatever the source, army historian Irving Holley concludes, “the President’s big round number was a psychological target to lift sights and accustom planners in military and industrial circles alike to thinking big.”

  Speaking later about the fifty-thousand figure, U. S. Steel Chairman Edward Stettinius said it seemed at first “like an utterly impossible goal; but it caught the imagination of Americans, who had always believed they could a
ccomplish the impossible.” By laying down the gauntlet in such a sensational way, by projecting on his audience his own faith in the ability of the American people to respond to crisis, Roosevelt seemed to cast a spell upon the members of the House and the Senate, who sprang to their feet and began applauding wildly.

  “There are some,” Roosevelt concluded, “who say that democracy cannot cope with the new technique of government developed in recent years by a few countries—by a few countries which deny the freedoms which we maintain are essential to our democratic way of life. This I reject.” To cope with present dangers, he admitted, the nation requires “a toughness of moral and physical fiber,” but these are precisely “the characteristics of a free people, a people devoted to the institutions they themselves have built.”

  In times of crisis, presidential scholar Grant McConnell has written, the nation, which seemed only an abstraction the day before, suddenly becomes a vivid reality. A mysterious process unfolds as the president and the flag become rallying points for all Americans. At such moments, if the president is able to meet the challenge, he is able to give shape, to organize, to create and recreate the nation.

  On May 16, 1940, President Roosevelt met this challenge. When he finished his speech, the voices of the senators and representatives rose in a ringing shout, a sustained ovation whose echoes remained in the chamber after the president had left.

  The rain was over, but drops of water still dripped from the trees when the president emerged from the Capitol. At the bottom of the steps, Eleanor took leave of her husband to join a group of young people for lunch at the Powhatan Hotel. The president returned directly to his office, buoyed not simply by the tremendous reception he had received, but even more by his own expression of faith in the dormant powers of democracy, his unalterable belief in the American people.

  • • •

  Roosevelt “believed that with enough energy and spirit anything could be achieved by man,” the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote in an essay comparing Roosevelt and Churchill. “So passionate a faith in the future,” Berlin went on, “implies an exceptionally sensitive awareness, conscious or self-conscious, of the tendencies of one’s milieu, of the desires, hopes, fears, loves, hatreds, of the human beings who compose it, of what are described as ‘trends.’” This uncanny awareness, Berlin argued, was the source of Roosevelt’s genius. It was almost as if the “inner currents [and] tremors” of human society were registering themselves within his nervous system, “with a kind of seismographical accuracy.”

  In his imagination on this grim May day, Roosevelt could already envision the construction of hundreds of new factories, fueled by new public-private partnerships, producing planes and tanks and guns, humming with the energies of millions of citizens. On the nation’s roads he pictured tens of thousands of American families, their life’s possessions in their automobiles, willing to go to wherever the opportunity for work would take them. Little matter that the economy was still depressed and that millions of workers had lost their skills. To the man whose ebullient energy had overcome paralysis, it was natural to believe that the American people, once aroused, would transform the nation, pitching into the work at hand with spirit and resilience. But even Roosevelt could not have imagined that he stood that day on the verge of the most profound transformation in American history.

  “There’s something that he’s got,” Harry Hopkins once told Frances Perkins. “It seems unreasonable at times, but he falls back on something that gives him complete assurance that everything is going to be all right that I can’t even grasp, that he isn’t able . . . to explain to me. I’m just left feeling that it’s a ridiculous position he’s taken. Why should he be sure that it will be all right?”

  No factor was more important to Roosevelt’s leadership than his confidence in himself and in the American people. “His most outstanding characteristic is an air of supreme self-confidence,” journalist W. M. Kiplinger wrote as the crisis of the European war deepened. “He always gives the impression that to him nothing is impossible, that everything will turn out all right.”

  The president had a remarkable capacity to transmit this cheerful strength to others, to allow, White House Counsel Sam Rosenman observed, “those who hear it to begin to feel it and take part in it, to rejoice in it—and to return it tenfold by their own confidence.” Frances Perkins claimed that “his capacity to inspire and encourage those who had to do tough, confused and practically impossible jobs was beyond dispute.” Like everyone else, she said, she “came away from an interview with the President feeling better, not because he had solved any problems . . . but because he had made me feel more cheerful, stronger, more determined.”

  So it had been in 1933, when, in the midst of the worst days of the Depression, the new president was able to communicate his own strength and assurances to a badly frightened people. Speaking of his first inaugural address, Collier’s observed that “the new President does not delude himself as to the difficulties that lie before him, and yet he was serenely confident as to the ultimate outcome.” By this single speech, Rosenman wrote, Roosevelt accomplished one of the most significant achievements of his presidency: “the renewal of the courage and hope and faith of the American people. Within a week, more than half a million letters and telegrams were on their way to the White House, expressing faith in him and in his leadership.”

  Such serenity and strength were precisely the qualities called for in the spring of 1940, as America faced a second national crisis, even more fearful than the first. His belief that dormant energies of democracy could mobilize the nation to meet the Nazi threat was matched only by his own faith in himself. To be optimistic had become his stance in life, so much that, even when he had no reason to be so, he acted upbeat, so as not to disappoint the expectations of everyone around him.

  • • •

  In the afterglow of the president’s triumphant speech, all the leading Republicans—Kansas governor and Republican presidential candidate in 1936, Alf Landon; newspaper publisher Colonel Frank Knox; and New York Governor Tom Dewey—fell into line. Even former President Herbert Hoover was forced to admit, “the President is right.” What made this united front more striking was that the president had made no mention in his speech of how the government was going to pay for the new defense program. When reporters queried him, he used the metaphor of “a four alarm fire up the street” which must be extinguished immediately, without worrying about cost. His homely figure of speech evaded the issue and achieved his end. The main thing was to arouse the public to the Nazi threat, and then worry about how to raise the cash.

  But the unified alarm about American security, as Time magazine pointed out, “was quickly succeeded by alarm over the fate of the GOP in 1940.” On second thought, Tom Dewey proclaimed, the fifty-thousand figure was ridiculous. On second thought, Alf Landon stated, the president’s message was “tragically late.” On second thought, newspaper publisher Frank Gannett said, the message dramatized “the failure of the New Deal to meet and solve the basic problems facing the country.”

  The expected Republican criticism assumed a darker tone that Sunday night, May 18, when Colonel Charles Lindbergh, the famed aviator, in a nationwide radio address accused the administration of creating “a defense hysteria” and insisted that the United States was not threatened by foreign invasion unless “American peoples bring it on through their own quarreling and meddling with affairs abroad.” The only reason we are in danger of becoming involved, he concluded, “is because there are powerful elements in America who desire us to take part. They represent a small minority of the American people, but they control much of the machinery of influence and propaganda. They seize every opportunity to push us closer to the edge.”

  The isolationists had found their champion. Senator Bennett Clark of Missouri termed Lindbergh’s speech “magnificent,” and Representative John Rankin of Mississippi called it “the finest advice I have heard in many a day.” Senator Gerald P. Nye of North D
akota was glad, he said, “to hear a voice like Lindbergh’s raised in the cause of sanity at this wild moment—a moment engineered by the President.”

  Lindbergh’s scathing critique legitimized congressional fault-finding with the president’s popular speech. “During the present Administration,” Senator Clark argued, “we have spent in excess of $6 billion on building up the Army and the Navy, and now we are told that we are pitifully unprepared. Simply because an emergency has developed abroad, are we going to turn over lump sums to the same outfit of bunglers that apparently wasted the $6 billion we spent.” Two days later, Clark took the floor again. “[Are we going] to pour another billion dollars down the same rat hole?” he asked. (In fact, spread over the years of the Roosevelt administration the $6 billion amounted to less than three-quarters of a billion a year, hardly enough to keep a small army in existence.)

  “If I should die tomorrow,” Roosevelt told Henry Morgenthau at lunch in a rare moment of blind fury the day after Lindbergh’s speech, “I want you to know this. I am convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.” Roosevelt did not anger easily, Eleanor later observed, “but when he did get angry, he was like an iceberg and . . . he could say things that would finish a relationship forever.” On the issue of Lindbergh, however, Roosevelt was not alone. “When I read Lindbergh’s speech,” President Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State Henry Stimson wrote Roosevelt, “I felt it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster had completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient.” Speaking in a more tempered voice, Eleanor told a newspaper reporter she thought the first part of Lindbergh’s speech, which analyzed the position of America in the air, was “excellent,” but “the last three paragraphs,” referring to the sinister elements in America, seemed to her “unfortunate.”