Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. - The Politics of Upheaval: 1935–1936

For J. K. Galbraith and Seymour E. Harris

FIRST MARINER BOOKS EDITION 2003

Copyright 1960 by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Copyright renewed 1988 by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Foreword to the Mariner Edition copyright 2003 by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 0-618-34087-4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-618-34087-3 (pbk)

e ISBN 978-0-547-52425-2
v3.1015

P OLITICS OFTEN TAKES the form of theater, and this is especially the case for Franklin D. Roosevelts first term.

Act One. In 1932 FDR arrives on the national stage in the midst of Americas worst depression. Unemployment rises to a quarter of the labor force. Hunger and misery are spreading. There are mutterings of revolution. Capitalism itself appears to be on the ropes. Gloom is everywhere. Then, sworn in as president in March 1933, FDR starts out with a bang. His inaugural address tells Americans that the only thing they have to fear is fear itself. The excitement and legislative productivity of his first Hundred Days bring the despairing country to life again. The first-act curtain goes down to uproarious applause.

Act Two. But bringing the country to life again liberates energies all around, including resentment of FDR and opposition to his New Deal. In 1934 economic recovery reduces the unifying effect of national crisis, restores the nations confidence in itself, and emboldens vociferous adversaries on the right and the left to assail the Roosevelt administration. The presidential magic begins to wear off. The second act ends in early 1935 with the president baffled and dispirited, his New Deal bag of tricks seemingly exhausted. He is surrounded by foes, led by the nine old men, the august Supreme Court of the United States itself.

Act Three. In 1935 the Supreme Court knocks out vital New Deal laws. When the National Recovery Act falls, FDR starts to fight back. He changes course, beginning what (some) historians call the Second New Deal and compiling a legislative record even more impressive than that of the Hundred Days. His enemies are routed. In 1936 he coasts to reelection on a landslide, carrying all but two of the forty-eight states. His triumph seems complete.

The Coming of the New Deal deals with act one.The Politics of Upheaval covers acts two and three, those turbulent last years of FDRs first term. I should make clear that the division into the First and Second New Deals proposed in these pages does not command universal assent. Those labels were used by journalists at the time, though with little agreement as to what the exact distinction was. They were brought into the scholarly literature by Basil Rauch in his early History of the New Deal(1944), though his definition of the two New Deals differs from the one presented in this volume. New Deal veterans who read the manuscript before publication more or less accepted the argument about the First and Second New Deals. But Leon Keyserling, who worked for Senator Robert F. Wagner in the 1930s and later became President Trumans chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, did not, and filed a powerful dissent, which I reprint on .

Keyserling may be right in his skepticism. Historians tend to tidy things up and extract patterns from messy realities. In the improvisations of the profoundly pluralist Roosevelt presidency there was more continuity and overlap than too stark a differendadon among New Deals (some historians perceive a Third New Deal) would imply. Nonetheless I continue to think there was a visible shift in the policy, politics, and personnel of the New Deal that justifies at least the Second New Deal.

The First New Deal breathed the spirit of the New Nadonalism of Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Croly; the Second New Deal, the spirit of the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson and Louis D. Brandeis. First New Dealers saw economic concentration as inevitable and national planning as desirable; Second New Dealers wished to restore a competitive marketplace. In theory the two creeds pointed in opposite direcdons; but in practice they were not necessarily incompatible. After all, they had the same ultimate goalto offset the power of business by the power of government. Wilsons New Freedom thus ended by adopting some of the projects of TRs New Nationalism. My abstract models may have been too clear-cut to do justice to the messy realities. The caveats of Keyserling and of such able New Deal historians as William E. Leuchtenburg, Anthony J. Badger, and David M. Kennedy should be woven into the historical assessment.

As for FDR, he was the sternal pragmatist, always preferring existence to essence. Brandis is one thousand percent right in principle, he wrote a friend in 1936, but in certain fields there must be a guiding or restraining hand of Government because of the very nature of the specific field.

In the dream of 193436 FDR is the dominating player, but he has a picturesque supporting cast. The dialogue is gaudy and vigorous. What artists of ingenious invective there were in the 1930s!Huey Long, Hugh Johnson, Harold Ickes, John L. Lewis, Frank Knox, Gerald L. K. Smith. Many of them, like Ickes and Knox, underwent their initiation into politics in 1912 and adopted the TR/Bull Moose rhetorical convention of exaggeration, by which nothing seemed worth saying if not said at the top of ones voice. Also they were mostly originals and adept at inventing a new vocabulary of disparagement. The political dialogue of the United States in the twenty-first century (so far) seems pallid in comparison.

How serious in these years were the challenges to the New Deal? The tirades of a sour Herbert Hoover and a sour Al Smithopponents in the 1928 election, they now agreed on the villainy of Franklin D. Rooseveltwere, like the opposition of the American Liberty League, of positive benefit to the Democrats. In 1936 the Republicans sensibly denied renomination to Hoover and turned to the one-time Bull Mooser and mildly New Dealish governor of Kansas, Alfred M. Landon.

This led to one of the most engaging episodes of my life as a historian. I wrote Governor Landon in the spring of 1959 inquiring whether he would grant an interview and wondering whether I might have access to his papers. He answered favorably, and in April I went to Topeka. Landon received me cordially, took me to luncheon, gave long and candid interviews, and opened his papers to me. I said that I would clear with him any quotations from his letters. He said, Dont bother with that. You are free to use anything you want from my letters.

This in turn led to an enduring friendship. Alf Landon throughout his life (except for a few weeks at the end of the 1936 campaign) was a stout progressive. I never liked to be called The Kansas Coolidge, he told William Allen White... The Coolidge family were always, apparently, all regularsmy family were always insurgents. In later years he was the first consequential political figure to call for the recognition of Red China. I first heard of the John Birch Society, a sinister right-wing group, in an early-warning letter from Landon in December 1960.

When Landon came to Washington in the spring of 1962, I arranged an appointment with President Kennedy. Our conversation drifted from north to south and from south back to north, Landon later told me, like the smoke from a hookah. I asked him whether JFK reminded him at all of FDR. He said, No. Kennedy is very frank and straightforward. Roosevelt was always on the stage, always giving a performance. He went on to describe Truman. For the first two years he was too humble. Thereafter he became too cocky. Kennedy is neither humble nor cocky. (When I asked Kennedy about his chat with Landon, he said, I liked him. Very Trumanesque.)