Penguin History of the United States of America (103 page)

Roosevelt did not disagree with this truism; but he did not take the same view of what the Constitution was as the aged judges did, and he grew more and more restive with the principle, indiscreetly laid down by Charles Evans Hughes in his youth, that the Constitution was what the judges say it is. Black Monday was bad enough; but it was followed by the disastrous session of 1936, when in succession the Court invalidated the AAA; an Act regulating prices and working conditions in coal-mining; and a New York state law setting a minimum wage for women workers. Significantly, none of these decisions was unanimous: it seemed that six old men were wantonly intent on carving the heart out of a political programme overwhelmingly supported by the people of the United States. Even the Wagner Act and
the new Agriculture Act seemed to be in danger. In the circumstances it is not surprising that the President decided to safeguard the New Deal against judicial counter-revolution before bringing forward anymore new proposals.

His mistake was not to consult Congressional Democratic leaders first (indeed, he consulted nobody worth mentioning). He should have known better. In the first place, it is extremely difficult, as several Presidents have found, to weaken formally any of the co-equal branches of the federal government. They are entrenched, not just in the Constitution, but in the habits, if not always the affections, of the sovereign American people: it is difficult, indeed probably impossible, to rally enough support for long enough to win the day in an assault upon them. To make such a constitution work, then, it is necessary for its principal instruments to show respect and restraint towards each other. The Court majority, to be sure, had been showing little respect for the Presidency and Congress, but the way to defeat it was not by behaving in the same fashion. Tampering with the Constitution is the sin of witchcraft in American life; any President (or for that matter any judge, or any member of Congress) who can be plausibly accused of the offence may expect to find his support melting mysteriously away from day to day. And Roosevelt was blatantly trying to tamper with the Constitution by packing the Court: the plan he suddenly unveiled on 5 February 1937 proposed the appointment of extra Justices up to the number of six, if those Justices over the age of seventy did not ‘voluntarily’ retire. The excuse for this proposal was that the Court needed to be made more efficient. Many of Roosevelt’s most ardent supporters in other matters were deeply unhappy about the scheme; for one thing, the senior Justice, Louis Brandeis (then aged eighty), was one of the President’s staunchest allies. It seemed ungrateful to imply that he was no longer up to his job.

Even more important, in practical terms, was the reaction of the conservatives among the Democrats. These men on the whole represented the main traditions of the party as it had existed between the Civil War and 1913. They were in many cases elderly; and, crucially, many of them were Southerners. Like their counterparts in the Republican party and elsewhere, they had been ready to accept the measures of the early New Deal, if only because of the general emergency, and because of the predominantly rural nature of their constituencies – constituencies which had been greatly aided by the AAA and its related agencies. They had not liked subsequent developments nearly so well, above all Roosevelt’s ever-deepening commitment to the wishes of organized labour. John L. Lewis’s campaign to destroy the resistance of heavy industry to a unionized workforce was bad enough in itself; but the New Deal’s commitment to raising wages and cutting working hours was worse. Taken together these tendencies directly threatened the continuance of the South as a region of unorganized, badly paid labour, where restrictions on hours, and expensive provisions for worker safety, were minimal. Besides, many of the workers there were black. If the CIO could unionize the South it would not only reduce the attractiveness
of that region to business investors looking for low labour costs; it would begin to destroy the edifice of white supremacy, for you cannot give a man the power to organize and protect himself economically without giving him the power to do so politically (and vice versa). The Southerners regarded Roosevelt’s popularity among labour and blacks with the gravest misgivings. They feared for their future power in the Democratic party. Assuming that FDR would not try to succeed himself in 1940, it was important that the party should not swing so far in the liberal direction as to be irrecoverable in that year. The Supreme Court issue was perfect as an excuse for rebellion: it enabled the conservatives, most respectably, to cry halt. Besides, most Southern Senators were constitutional lawyers at heart, like their forerunner Calhoun. They were sincerely affronted when sacrilegious hands were laid on the ark. They abandoned their leader. ‘Boys, here’s where I cash in my chips,’ said one of them.

The resultant battle dragged on until the autumn. It was made ludicrous at an early stage, when the Supreme Court reversed itself by approving the Wagner Act. Mr Justice Roberts and the Chief Justice himself had at last understood the danger to the Court of constantly challenging the Presidency, Congress and the voters, and adopted the doctrines of judicial caution which Stone and Brandeis had been vainly urging upon them for years. One of the reactionary Justices gave up the battle and retired, to be replaced by a stalwart Southern liberal, Hugo Black of Alabama. Chief Justice Hughes issued a paper showing that Roosevelt’s allegations that the Court was overworked and inefficient were wide of the mark. There the dispute should have ended, but Roosevelt was grimly determined on victory and struggled on until it became clear that Congress was never going to support him. He then had to acknowledge the first and most devastating defeat of his Presidency.

Matters were made worse by economic events. The men closest to the President at that moment – Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury, for example – were orthodox financiers and economists who had managed to convince themselves, in the middle of a just barely convalescent economy, that the United States was in serious danger of inflation and that it was therefore essential to balance the federal budget at last. They persuaded their chief, and he began to run down the spending programmes, at just the moment when the new social security taxes were anyway taking large amounts of purchasing power out of the market. The result should have been foreseen: the industrial recovery was cut off suddenly, factories once more began to close and the number of unemployed leaped upwards. By Christmas two million more workers had lost their jobs. Republicans began to talk of ‘the Roosevelt depression’. After bitter and prolonged debates within the administration the spending programmes were revived, and Roosevelt tried to push through new measures. But he had lost too much authority in the Court battle; the continuing aggressiveness of the CIO alarmed many middle-class citizens, which in turn affected their representatives;
very little of the new legislation was passed, though a Fair Labour Standards act, introducing the forty-hour week, did get through. The rest of the Congressional session was wasted in futile wrangling.

Roosevelt grew more and more annoyed, and eventually, in the summer of 1938, decided to try to purge the Democratic party of mutineers. He toured the country, asking Democratic voters in that year’s primary elections to reject such enemies as Senator George of Georgia or Senator ‘Cotton Ed’ Smith of South Carolina. But he had not prepared the ground sufficiently, and it is always hazardous for a President to intervene in local battles, as was proved when George and Smith were triumphantly re-nominated; and to make matters worse, in the autumn election the Republican party, profiting from the recession, staged an effective comeback, taking eight Senate seats and no less than eighty-one House seats from the Democrats. The latter still had a majority in both houses, as Roosevelt took some comfort in pointing out, but their liberal wing had been seriously weakened. Congress was now dominated by conservatives, all too many of whom believed, or professed to believe, that Roosevelt was aiming at a dictatorship, which made it their bounden duty to resist everything he proposed. In two years’ time, they fondly supposed, he would retire, and with any luck a conservative would succeed him – either one of the new Republican stars or a right-wing Democrat. The disasters of the past eighteen months had left their mark on the administration. The New Dealers were showing signs of that curious sterile fatigue which so often overtakes reforming governments at the end of their time (comparable cases are the Wilson administration in 1919 and 1920, the Attlee government of 1950–51). Harry Hopkins’s health had collapsed; Eleanor Roosevelt wanted Franklin to retire in 1941, in spite of the talk about a third term that was already being floated. All in all, it seemed that the New Deal was at an end.

Radicals could mourn; but their works remained, enormous and irreversible. Later critics have blamed the New Deal for not going further, faster: it is always so easy to demand the impossible, and so tempting to play down the importance of starting something. FDR and his team had started a lot, and as he himself said after the 1938 elections, ‘It takes a long, long time to bring the past up to the present.’ Rather than comparing the New Deal to Utopia, it is better to bring out its actual achievements. Of these unquestionably the most important was the preservation of American democracy, the American Constitution and American capitalism. Men are so governed, in their perceptions as in everything else, by abstractions that it was difficult or impossible for many of Roosevelt’s critics to see this; they thought of him and spoke of him as if he were a cat of the same stripe as Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin; but nowadays the truth is plain and he must be placed along with Washington and Lincoln, as a shaper, preserver and defender of the American Constitution and political system. His task entailed adaptation and sacrifice, and hence aroused fierce opposition. But in the end he prevailed, even in defeat: for if the Supreme Court reminded him, forcibly,
of the limits of his own power, he taught the Court itself an even more salutary lesson – not to stand in the way of necessary change – and so equipped it for its important role in modern American democracy. In his relations with Congress he showed what could be done, on what a scale, when executive and legislature were in partnership; he proved, as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had suggested by their careers, that in the twentieth century it was necessary for the Presidency to take the lead, and Congress to accept the role of junior partner, as much in fashioning the laws as in administering them; but his relations with Congress after 1937 also showed that at times the President must content himself with piecemeal achievements – indeed, that has been the normal state of affairs ever since. He also accustomed Congress, and the country, to the necessary activism of modern government, so that the stream of statutes, which seemed so astonishing in the Hundred Days, has become the norm of Congressional life (though few of the laws passed have anything like the importance of the first New Deal legislation). He thus enabled the American government to assume the responsibility of safeguarding the welfare of the American people in a sense far more radical than that envisaged by the Founding Fathers, but not in a fashion inconsistent with what they most valued – republican government. As a side-effect of all this, the federal bureaucracy grew, and Washington became a great city at last. More important, by his gallantry, energy, eloquence and warmth of heart, he not only transformed the prestige of his office but galvanized an entire generation with faith in their country, their leader and their political system. In this way he laid the foundations for the achievements of the next generation: the impetus he gave to politics would not be exhausted for another thirty years. Thanks to Franklin Roosevelt, in short, six years (1933 to 1938) transformed America from a country which had been laid low by troubles which its own incompetence had brought on it, and which it was quite unable to cope with, to a country, as it proved, superbly equipped to meet the worst shocks that the modern world could hurl at it.

It was enough.

Some indeed still hold to the now somewhat obvious delusion that we of the United States can safely permit the United States to become a lone island, a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force. Such an island may be the dream of those who still talk and vote as isolationists. Such an island represented to me and to the overwhelming majority of Americans today a helpless nightmare, the helpless nightmare of a people without freedom. Yes, the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charlottesville Address, 10 June 1940

Diplomacy is perhaps the most difficult of the political arts, and the theory was once widely held that democracies were especially bad at it. It is undeniable that the United States, during the first 160-odd years of its independence, all too often showed itself to be diplomatically inept. There were some well-earned triumphs, but on the whole the record is dismal. This is especially true of the period between the two world wars, when the results of incompetence were calamitous for all mankind. They should have been avoided. Winston Churchill always insisted that the Second World War need not have happened. Determined police action at an early stage could and should have been taken to stop Hitler. It is more difficult to see how war between Japan and the West could have been avoided, but even so it cannot positively be said that preventive action would have failed. It was never tried. And the war came.

Blame for this state of affairs must rest in large part on the statesmen who let it come about or (in the case of Germany and Japan) actively encouraged it; but the most important lesson of the period – perhaps the only one worth learning – will be overlooked if the matter is left there. The fact is that the leaders of the Western democracies partly shared the delusions of their countrymen, and were in any case shackled by them. Very few
politicians saw the nature of the world’s predicament as clearly as Churchill, and even he might have been less perceptive if he had been in office during the thirties instead of in opposition. Even he, even if he had retained his clarity of vision, would have found it extremely difficult to induce the British, let alone other nations, to act against Hitler in time. Public opinion throughout the West had learned many lessons from the First World War, almost all of them wrong. It clung to its errors with passionate determination. The errors were not all of the same stripe. Some people favoured pacifism, others an Anglo-German
rapprochement
, others distrusted their government too deeply to collaborate with it until the anarchists, socialists or communists had remodelled it. All were chasing shadows. Yet the moral is not that they were uniquely silly or misguided. In their opinionated bewilderment and their reluctance to commit themselves to action they strongly resembled their descendants. The decade of the thirties remains supremely worth study for that reason. For, as the history of the United States was to show, though a lot was learned, correctly this time, in the immediately following years, the underlying difficulties of conducting a wise diplomacy in a democracy were not removed, and in the sixties they reasserted themselves with appalling results. If they are not to do so yet again, with perhaps the worst result of all, they must at least be faced, and their history be studied.