Roosevelt boldly set up numerous New Deal agencies designed to provide relief, recovery, and reform. He presided over one of the most active periods of political innovation in the Republic's history. His programs forever changed the structure of U.S. social and economic life, although they never did fully defeat the devastating Great Depression. Roosevelt ignored campaign pledges to reduce government expenses, balance the budget, prune the bureaucracy, maintain a sound currency, and eliminate the improper use of money in politics. But he honored other promises, directly or indirectly, in the reciprocal tariff program, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the repeal of prohibition, the insurance of bank deposits, and the encouragement of labor unions. Critics of the New Deal cried that Roosevelt promoted class hatred by setting the poor against the rich. New Dealers retorted that they were merely putting need above greed. The voters endorsed Roosevelt so resoundingly at the polls in 1934 and 1936 that he was emboldened to unveil his scheme for "packing" the Supreme Court in 1937. Though soundly rebuffed, he won an unprecedented third-term election in 1940, with a strong assist from the crisis in Europe and a new war-born prosperity.

The Agreeable FDR (1949)
The smiling, wisecracking Franklin Roosevelt could occasionally be brutal when he "got his Dutch up," but ordinarily he recoiled from hurting people's feelings. Senator Huey Long complained, "I wonder if he says 'Fine!' to everybody." This trait of ultra-agreeableness led visitors to suspect a lack of candor and truthfulness. In the following account from Mrs. Roosevelt's memoirs, note particularly why the president was often misunderstood.

The few books that have already been written about Franklin show quite plainly that everyone writes from his own point of view, and that a man like my husband, who was particularly susceptible to people, took color from whomever he was with, giving to each one something different of himself. Because he disliked being disagreeable, he made an effort to give each person who came in contact with him the feeling that he understood what his particular interest was. . . .

Often people have told me that they were misled by Franklin. Even when they have not said it in so many words, I have sometimes felt that he left them, after an interview, with the idea that he was in entire agreement with them. I would know quite well, however, that he was not, and that they would be very much surprised when later his actions were in complete contradiction to what they thought his attitude would be.

This misunderstanding not only arose from his dislike of being disagreeable, but from the interest that he always had in somebody else's point of view and his willingness to listen to it. If he thought it was well expressed and clear, he nodded his head and frequently said, "I see," or something of the sort. This did not mean that he was convinced of the truth of the arguments, or even that he entirely understood them, but only that he appreciated the way in which they were presented.

Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (1949), p. 2.

Coffee for the Veterans (1933)
In 1932, during Hoover's last year as president, some thirty thousand unemployed veterans had descended on Washington to obtain advance bonus payments from Congress. They occupied vacant buildings, erected makeshift camps without proper sanitation, and posed a threat to the public health and safety. A fearful Hoover, having doubled the White House guard, finally gave orders that resulted in their eviction by federal troops with bayonets, tear gas, and torches. A second, smaller bonus army came early in the Roosevelt administration, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (the first female cabinet member) describes how Roosevelt welcomed them. How do Roosevelt's political instincts compare with those of Hoover?

Like other kindhearted, liberal people, Roosevelt had been shocked by President Hoover's orders to drive veterans of World War I out of Anacostia Flats in Washington and to burn their encampment when they had marched there in protest in 1931 [1932]. He had been shocked that the President should fear his fellow citizens. His instinct had cried out that veterans in an illegal encampment in Washington, even if difficult and undesirable, must all be faced in a human and decent way. He had said little, had just shaken his head and shuddered, when the incident took place.

When the veterans came to Washington in March 1933, in a similar, if smaller, march on the capital followed by an encampment, Roosevelt drove out and showed himself, waving his hat at them. He asked Mrs. Roosevelt and Louis Howe* to go. "Above all," he said to them, "be sure there is plenty of good coffee. No questions asked. Just let free coffee flow all the time. There is nothing like it to make people feel better and feel welcome."

After the veterans in 1933 had the free coffee and a visit from Mrs. Roosevelt, they were willing to send a committee to talk with Howe. Gradually they began to go home, and relief funds were found to help them start back.

[This was the last demonstration of its kind during these years.]

*A former newspaperman, Howe was a key Roosevelt aide and speechwriter.

From The Roosevelt I Knew by Frances Perkins, pp. 83-85, 111-112. 

FDR the Administrative "Artist" (1948)
The numerous and overlapping agencies of the New Deal created an atmosphere of indescribable confusion. Roosevelt was generally reputed to be a wretchedly bad administrator. Rather than face a disagreeable scene by dismissing an incompetent subordinate, he would set up a competing agency. Robert E. Sherwood, playwright and winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, served with a government agency (the Office of War Information) during World War II. He was forced to discharge one of his employees, and here he tells what happened when he reported this unpleasant incident to the president. In what sense was Roosevelt both a poor administrator and a superior one?

Roosevelt now had an expression of open amazement and said, "I can't believe it. I can't believe you had the courage to fire anybody. I thought you were a complete softy--like me."

That scrap of highly unimportant conversation can indicate why those who knew Roosevelt well could never imagine him assuming the role of dictator. He could be and was ruthless and implacable with those whom he considered guilty of disloy- alty; but with those in his Administration who were inefficient or even recalcitrant or hopelessly inept, but loyal, he was "a complete softy." He wasted precious hours of time and incalculable quantities of energy and ingenuity trying to find face-saving jobs--or "kicking upstairs" methods--for incompetents who should have been thrown out unceremoniously.

Roosevelt's methods of administration--typified in his handling of the work relief organization--were, to say the least, unorthodox. They filled some practical-minded observers with apprehension and dismay, and some with disgust; they filled others with awe and wonder. I am sure that no final appraisal of them can be made for a long time to come; but there is one thing that can be said about these methods--whether they were good or bad, sensible or insane, they worked.

While preparing this book I interviewed Harold Smith, who was Director of the Budget from 1939 to 1946. Smith was a modest, methodical, precise man, temperamentally far removed from Roosevelt and Hopkins. But I know of no one whose judgment and integrity and downright common sense the President trusted more completely. In the course of a long conversation, Smith said to me:

"A few months ago, on the first anniversary of Roosevelt's death, a magazine asked me to write an article on Roosevelt as an administrator. I thought it over and decided I was not ready to make such an appraisal. I've been thinking about it ever since. When I worked with Roosevelt--for six years--I thought, as did many others, that he was a very erratic administrator. But now, when I look back, I can really begin to see the size of his programs. They were by far the largest and most complex programs that any President ever put through. People like me who had the responsibility of watching the pennies could only see the five or six or seven per cent of the programs that went wrong, through inefficient organization or direction. But now I can see in perspective the ninety-three or -four or -five per cent that went right--including the winning of the biggest war in history--because of unbelievably skillful organization and direction. And if I were to write that article now, I think I'd say that Roosevelt must have been one of the greatest geniuses as an administrator that ever lived. What we couldn't appreciate at the time was the fact that he was a real artist in government."

That word "artist" was happily chosen, for it suggests the quality of Roosevelt's extraordinary creative imagination. I think that he would have resented the application of the word as implying that he was an impractical dreamer; he loved to represent himself as a prestidigitator who could amaze and amuse the audience by "pulling another rabbit out of a hat." But he was an artist and no canvas was too big for him.

From Roosevelt and Hopkins, pp. 72-73, by Robert E. Sherwood. 

The Planned-Scarcity Scandal (1934)
The surest way to raise the prices of farm produce to a profit-making level was to reduce the mountainous surpluses. Under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 ("Triple A"), 6 million pigs were slaughtered, and one-fourth of the cotton acreage (already planted) was plowed under. The proverbially stubborn mules, trained to walk between rows of cotton, balked at trampling on them. Critics of the New Deal sneered that the mules had more sense than the New Dealers. Norman Thomas--ex-Presbyterian clergyman, orator, author, editor, and six times Socialist candidate for the presidency (1928-1948)--here vents his indignation. What alternatives were there, given the existing economic and social framework?

Poverty and insecurity are, alas, old stories for men. It remained for this generation, and particularly this generation of Americans, to invent a new and most bitter type of poverty. Pearl Buck's moving description of famine in a Chinese village* is the kind of thing which, with minor changes, could have been written about agricultural villages over and over again in almost all parts of the world ever since the dim dawn of history. It remained for us to invent "bread lines knee-deep in wheat."

Other generations have been poor because they could not produce enough. We are told that we are poor because we have produced too much.

For thousands of years man had to accept the inevitability of scarcity. Society would have had the poor always with it, no matter how just and kind might have been its institutions, for the simple reason that man had not learned to harness the powers of nature to help him wrest an abundant living from the earth. It was on the basis of inevitable scarcity that the Greek philosophers tried to justify chattel slavery.

Today, as everybody admits, the machine is our slave. We depend not upon the energy of men but upon the energy of electricity to give us at once abundance and leisure. And still in a nation like our own, blessed by every gift man's skill and nature's abundance can bestow, millions of children go hungry. Their fathers vainly seek work that does not exist. They and their families are crowded together in shacks and slums and hovels while the builders of skyscrapers are idle.

No satirist ever penned such an indictment of a cruel and lunatic order of society as was written by the author of the Agricultural Adjustment Act in America who saw no way to restore a partial prosperity to farmers except to produce an artificial scarcity by paying agricultural producers from the proceeds of a tax on consumers to destroy the abundance of foodstuffs which men had struggled thousands upon thousands of years to be able to create.

And this, be it remembered, in the midst of a cold and hungry world. The more sincerely one believes that such legislation was an emergency necessity, the more terrible is the indictment of the civilization which brought it about.

*In her best-selling novel of 1931, The Good Earth.

From The Choice Before Us by Norman Thomas, pp. 5-7. Originally published by Macmillan Publishing Company, 1934; reprinted by AMS Press, Inc., 1970.

Henry Wallace Puts People Above Pigs (1935)
Henry A. Wallace, a Republican convert to the New Deal, served as Roosevelt's first secretary of agriculture. An Iowan who had edited a farm journal and made a fortune in the hybrid-seed business, Wallace was destined to have a controversial career as vice-president under Roosevelt and as presidential candidate on the Communist-backed Progressive ticket of 1948. Capable administrator, prolific author, and dynamic orator, Wallace was also a starry-eyed idealist who later proposed a quart of milk for all people. In this spirited radio defense of his New Deal policies, why does he claim that the producers of pig iron were more blameworthy than the New Dealers? In what way did the policy of planned scarcity actually save food from destruction?

People are still interested in the six million pigs that were killed in September of 1933. In letters I have received following these radio talks, the pigs are mentioned more often than any one thing except potatoes. One letter says:

"It just makes me sick all over when I think how the government has killed millions and millions of little pigs, and how that has raised pork prices until today we poor people cannot even look at a piece of bacon." . . .

So six million little pigs were killed in September of 1933. They were turned into one hundred million pounds of pork. That pork was distributed for relief. It went to feed the hungry. Some very small pigs could not be handled as meat by the packers. These were turned into grease and tankage for fertilizer.

If those six million pigs had grown up they would have been marketed in January, February, and March of 1934. They probably would have brought around $2.50 a hundredweight. Instead of that the price of hogs at that time averaged [a profitable] $3.60. . . .

Strange to say, I find myself in strong sympathy with the attitude of many folks who held up their hands in horror about the killing of little pigs. I will go further than most of them in condemning scarcity economics. We want an economy of abundance, but it must be balanced abundance of those things we really want.

The pig-iron reduction control of the big steel companies in 1933 was in principle one thousand times as damnable as the pig-reduction campaign of 1933. Pig-iron production in 1932 was about twenty percent of that in 1929. Pig production in 1933 in pounds was ninety-seven percent of that of 1929. In 1934 pig-iron production was about forty-five percent of that of 1929. Pig production in 1934, the drought year, was eighty percent of that of 1929.

In other words, farmers cut pig production three percent when steel companies cut pig-iron production eighty percent. That sort of industrial reduction program plowed millions of workers out into the streets. It is because of that industrial reduction program that we have to spend billions for relief to keep the plowed-out workers from starvation. I hope industry in future reduction programs will not find it desirable to plow millions of workers out of their jobs. People are more important than pigs. . . .

My attention has been called to a statement by a minister out in the Corn Belt before the district conference of his faith. Concerning the actions of the New Deal he says: ". . . some of them are downright sinful as the destruction of foodstuffs in the face of present want."

I have been used to statements of this sort by partisans, demagogues, politicians, and even newspaper columnists. To men of this sort I pay no attention, because I know that their interest in a cause makes it impossible for them to distinguish truth from falsehood. But when a minister of the gospel makes a statement, we expect it to be the truth.

Just what food does he think this administration has destroyed? We would like to know the specific instances. If he is merely referring to acreage control which enabled us to keep out of use in 1935 some thirty million of the fifty million acres which have produced in the past for markets in foreign countries, I would say, "Yes, we are guilty of acreage control and, depending on variations in weather, we shall continue to be until foreign purchasing power is restored by the breaking down of tariff and quota barriers."

We have not destroyed foodstuffs. We do not contemplate destroying them. However, foodstuffs were destroyed back in 1932 by farmers who found it profitable to burn their corn for fuel rather than to sell it for ten cents a bushel (which amounted to $3.33 a ton). It was cheaper for many farmers in the northwest Corn Belt to burn food for fuel at those pitiful prices than to burn coal.

People who believe that we ordered the destruction of food are merely the victims of their prejudices and the misinformation that has been fed to them by interested persons. What we actually did was to stop the destruction of foodstuffs by making it worth while for farmers to sell them rather than to destroy them.

Agricultural adjustment of the past two years has been a million times as warranted as the industrial reduction policy of the past five years. Why does not the minister attack the industrial reduction which was made possible by corporate and tariff laws? It was this reduction by industry that created the unemployment and destroyed the farmers' markets. . . .

Henry A. Wallace Papers, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, IA.

George Norris Plays Down Electric Power (1933)
George W. Norris, for thirty years U.S. senator from Nebraska, shone as one of the foremost liberals and reformers of his generation. He opposed war with Germany in 1917, fought the Treaty of Versailles, and authored the anti-lame duck (Twentieth) Amendment. Best known as the Father of the TVA, he fought tirelessly for this revolutionary high-dam project. (His fellow Republicans, finally fed up with his New Deal liberalism, read him out of the party in 1936.) The power companies attacked the TVA as primarily an effort to put the government in the electric power business. Norris replied that power was always secondary to navigation and flood control. He declared that the power trust, which favored a large number of obstructing small dams, "had no fundamental objection to making the Tennessee River navigable, but in pursuance of its own interest it preferred an unnavigable river to any interference with its monopolistic control of the generation and sale of electric power." In the final stages of the debate on the TVA bill, Norris spoke as follows. Why could electric power not have been the primary consideration in all instances?

We are confronted here, however, with the Government undertaking in the Tennessee Valley a great project, what we might call "a reclamation project." We are going to try to control the flow of the streams, particularly of the Tennessee River. We are going to try to control the floods. We are going to try to make the great stream navigable. We are going to reforest some of the land. We are going to put to better use some of the so-called "marginal lands." We are going to develop power. The development of power is only one of a large list of things we are going to try to do. They are all interlocked. In many of these improvements every one of these things will enter as a component part.

As to Dam No. 2,* which we own down there now, nobody that I know of has ever said how much of that dam should be allocated to navigation and how much to power. Most people think of it as a power dam only. They do not realize that if that dam had not been built, some similar improvement would have had to be constructed in order to make the Tennessee River navigable. A great lake has been constructed there over a portion of the river which at times in the year is just a rippling stream running over the rocks. . . .

Other dams--smaller dams, without any power--could have been built. Dam No. 3,** some twelve or fourteen miles above, a well-known dam provided for in the original plan, was never constructed. It strikes me . . . that no business man would construct Dam No. 3 as a power proposition. It would not pay; it would not be a good investment; but as a navigation proposition it is absolutely essential that we shall make the river navigable during portions of the year at least.

The difficulty arises because all this business is so interlocked and so interwoven that it is difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends, but when we put them together as a whole we know what we are going to get. We are going to get a navigable stream; we are going to get flood control; we are going to get power as an incident. But while the object of this bill is to get the maximum amount of flood control, it does not say the maximum amount of power, as will be noted by anyone who will read the bill. It provides for securing the maximum amount of flood control, the maximum amount of navigation--flood control and navigation--and the maximum amount of power "not inconsistent with navigation and flood control." That, I think, is the language of the bill.

The power is really a secondary proposition. It comes about because it would be sinful to build all these dams and not develop some power. When it shall be developed, what is going to be done with it? The Government has it on its hands, and why should not the people of that great basin have the benefit of it?

*Today's Wilson Dam.

**Today's Wheeler Dam.

Congressional Record, 73d Cong., 1st sess. (May 2, 1933), p. 2684.

Wendell Willkie Exposes the Rubber Yardstick (1937)
The aroused power companies fought the TVA all the way to the Supreme Court. They contended that expensive high dams would not check erosion, that inexpensive low dams would better serve navigation and flood control, and that the loss to individuals from floods was less than the cost of the grandiose project. Dynamic, tousle-haired, and eloquent Wendell Willkie, later an outspoken liberal and the opponent of Roosevelt in the presidential campaign of 1940, complained as follows in 1937 as president of the competing Commonwealth and Southern power corporation. (In 1939 it sold its Tennessee Electric Power Company to the TVA for some $78 million.) How fair or unfair was the so-called yardstick?

Like England's once famous military formation, the British Square, the TVA has had four fronts to present to the public, and it uses the front most suitable to the group which it is addressing. Before the courts it claims that it is not really a power enterprise, but primarily a conservation activity: it is a project to prevent floods, promote navigation on the Tennessee River, and check soil erosion in the great Tennessee Valley. Only before a more sympathetic audience is it frankly an instrument for the electrification of America. . . .

The TVA has therefore appeared to be on the side of the angels in the controversy between it and the utilities. But the conservation programme of the TVA is only a masquerade. It has no functional connection with the power programme of the Authority, and the amount spent on it is only an insignificant portion of the Authority's total expenditures. Other departments of government, both state and national, are charged with the duty of caring for soil erosion and are doing such work effectively without the building of dams and power facilities. . . .

The American people, therefore, are paying more than half a billion dollars for eleven dams, chiefly designed to supply power to one area. But this power, as will shortly be demonstrated, is to be supplied to this area at less than cost. In other words, the TVA will operate annually at a deficit, and these annual deficits must, of course, be paid for out of the pockets of the taxpayers.

The sponsors of the TVA maintained at the beginning that this vast programme was not designed to create a competitive power system, but to set up a yardstick by which the rates of the private companies could be judged. The yardstick idea was undoubtedly attractive, since, after all, the average consumer did not understand much about electric rates and had no way of personally checking their relative highness or lowness.

Unfortunately, the yardstick is rubber from the first inch to the last.

From the generation of power at the beginning to its distribution to the ultimate consumer at the end, the TVA enjoys privileges and exemptions which are denied to the private utility, which conceal the true cost of TVA power, and the cost of which comes out of the pockets of you and me as taxpayers. These can be best illustrated by a direct comparison between the TVA and the Tennessee Electric Power Company, one of the typical companies in the Commonwealth and Southern System operating in that area.

The first advantage given to the TVA is exemption from practically all taxes. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 1936, the TVA paid only $45,347 in taxes. The Tennessee Electric Power Company (with approximately the same capital investment) paid $2,339,284 in taxes. Here is a difference in this item alone of $2,293,937.

Let us turn to the item of depreciation. This is an expense, a cost of operation, just as much as labor and fuel. This cost to the Tennessee Company, fixed and determined by the Tennessee Railroad and Public Utilities Commission, amounts to $1,260,000 per year. The books of the TVA, however, carry no item for depreciation.

The same is true with respect to interest charges. The Tennessee Company properties were built only in part with borrowed capital. During the twelve months ended June 30, 1936, this company paid interest and preferred dividends amounting to $4,299,022. On the other hand, the property of the TVA is built entirely with borrowed capital. The United States Government is paying interest and will continue to pay interest on such borrowings. The TVA books, however, show no item to cover this interest. It got its property from the Federal Government, which in turn, of course, collected its money from the taxpayer. . . .

Since the TVA is apparently selling its power at less than cost, it should say so. If the people who live in New York City, for example, are to pay part of the electric bill of people who live in Corinth, Mississippi, the people in New York should know about it. Perhaps they will not object. On more than one occasion the American people as a whole have contributed, through taxes, to a development designed to serve only a limited area. Often that is socially desirable. But if we are to pay part of the electric light bills of the Tennessee Valley, the TVA should honestly tell us so.

Also, if the TVA is attempting to force the utilities into public ownership, it should employ means that will neither deceive nor injure the public and will not jeopardize the interests of utility investors. It should announce its intention and proceed, by condemnation proceedings duly instituted in the courts of the land, to take over utility properties with fair compensation to the owners. This is both the honest and the humane method of action. Also, it gives the people a fair chance to protest if they don't like the change; or if they are still skeptical of political management of a major industry. . . .

From "Political Power" by Wendell L. Willkie from Atlantic Monthly 160 (August 1937), pp. 211-214. 

Displaced Tennesseans (1935)
Architects of the New Deal also designed the TVA to provide employment and to raise the living standards of an impoverished area. Electric lights and appliances were incredibly scarce. Before the valley bottoms were turned into lakes by the high dams, federal agents had to buy out the owners. More than one doughty Tennessean threatened to "shoot them TVA fellers." Form conclusions from this contemporary account as to the need for a TVA. Do the social gains justify the cost?

. . . On Cedar Creek lives Isabel Brantley.

"I was born in this house and so was my pappy before me, and here I've lived and here I'll die, even if I have to bolt the door and let the flood come--but there hain't a-goin' to be no flood!"

This was her greeting to the TVA appraiser, prepared to offer twelve hundred dollars for her log cabin and eroded acres. In the end she was won over by the generosity of TVA's laborers, who offered to move the house in their spare time, without cost to her, to a site below the dam. Persuaded but not softened, she declared, "You got to find me a place with a spring or a well. I don't want none of this newfangled pipe water runnin' into my house."

Such is the sales resistance encountered by Government agents.

When Ezra Hill saw the plans for the home which was to replace his old one in the flood area, he pointed to the place on the print showing the circles and ovals of bathroom fixtures. "What's all this? . . . I won't have it! I guess a privy is still good enough for me."

[The TVA brought improvement but not paradise; the per capita income of the region remained well below the national average. Demand for electrical power grew so rapidly in the region that the TVA added coal-fired steam plants to generate electricity after World War II and nuclear plants in the 1960s.]

Drew and Leon Pearson, "The Tennessee Valley Experiment," Harper's Magazine 170 (May 1935): 707.

Tom Girdler Girds for Battle (1937)
The New Dealers, with their strong appeal to the low-waged voter, encouraged the unionization of labor, notably through the Wagner Act of 1935. "Big steel" (including the U.S. Steel Corporation) reluctantly accepted unionization by the CIO (Committee for Industrial Organization). "Little steel," led by the tough-fisted but mild-appearing Tom Girdler, who became a hero to conservatives, struck back. At his Republic Steel Company's plant in Chicago on Memorial Day 1937, the police fired upon and killed ten strikers, while wounding many others. Several additional lives were lost in Ohio cities. Girdler, before a Senate committee, here justifies his opposition. Are the tactics of the CIO defensible (if correctly reported)? Are the accusations regarding communism convincing?

First of all let me make it clear that the fundamental issue in this strike is not one involving wages, hours, or working conditions in Republic [Steel Company] plants. This is not a strike in the sense that a large body of our employees quit work because of grievances against the company. What has happened is that an invading army descended upon our plants and forced many of our employees from their jobs.

Fully 23,000 of our employees have remained at work throughout the strike despite threats and violence, and many additional thousands have been kept from work against their will.

The basic issue of this strike is the right of American citizens to work, free from molestation, violence, coercion, and intimidation by a labor organization whose apparent policy is either to rule or to ruin American industry. . . .

The difficulties in the present dispute arise from the fact that the company will not enter into a contract, oral or written, with an irresponsible party; and the C.I.O., as presently constituted, is wholly irresponsible. . . .

The irresponsibility of the C.I.O. is well established by the fact that 200 strikes and walk-outs have taken place in the plants of the General Motors Corporation since that corporation signed an agreement with the C.I.O. which called for an end of strikes during the period of the agreement. . . .

Further evidence of the irresponsible character of the C.I.O. is to be seen in the lawless and terroristic conduct of its members since the beginning of the present strike. Republic plants have been surrounded by armed crowds who call themselves pickets and who, by force and violence, have imprisoned in the plants thousands of employees who refused to heed the strike call and remained at work. These men have been prevented from returning to their families when their work is done, and other employees who want to work have been prevented from getting into the plants.

Airplanes delivering food to workers besieged in the plants have been fired upon by armed mobs about the gates. The delivery of the United States mails has been interfered with. Railroad tracks have been dynamited. Families of men who are at work in the plants in certain communities have been threatened, coerced, and stoned. Defiance of law and order has been so flagrant that in some communities law enforcement has completely collapsed.

These illegal practices have not been peculiar to the Republic strike. They have characterized C.I.O. methods since the beginning of its organization drive in many industries. They have more than confirmed the conclusion reached by this company before the present strike ever started that the C.I.O. was and is an irresponsible and dangerous force in America. . . .

We believe that the C.I.O. with its terroristic methods and Communistic technique of picketing constitutes the most dangerous threat to the preservation of democracy in the United States. . . .

Now, let me state a few fundamental conclusions which I have reached about the C.I.O.

First. The C.I.O. has denied to free American citizens who refuse to pay tribute to it the right to work.

Second. The C.I.O. encourages and promotes violence and disregard of law. If this is done under instructions and approval of its leaders, it amounts to a confession on their part that they are deliberately adopting the methods of force and terrorism which have proved so successful for the dictators of Europe. If this is done without their approval and occurs because they cannot control their own men, it is a confession that the C.I.O. is an irresponsible party and that a contract with it would not be worth the paper upon which it is written.

Third. The C.I.O. is associated with Communism. Many of its leaders and organizers are avowed Communists. The Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the United States, gives the C.I.O. its full support. Can any organization which welcomes the support of the International Communist Party still claim that it adheres to the principles of democracy?

"Delivery or Non-Delivery of Mail in Industrial Strife Areas," Senate Committee on Post Offices, Hearings, 75th Cong., 1st sess. (1937), pp. 207-210.

John Lewis Lambasts Girdler (1937)
John L. Lewis--gruff, domineering, shaggy-browed--had risen from the depths of the coal mines to the head of the potent United Mine Workers of America. Seeking new worlds to conquer, he undertook to unionize mass-production industries through his Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO). The clash between him and Tom Girdler--both strong-minded men--became so noisy that FDR himself burst out, "A plague on both your houses." Four years later, in 1941, Girdler's "little steel" was forced to accept unionization. In this impassioned speech over a radio hookup, Lewis betrayed his anger. What was his loudest complaint? Why did he regard people like Girdler as more dangerous than communists?

Five of the corporations in the steel industry elected to resist collective bargaining and undertook to destroy the steel-workers' union. These companies filled their plants with industrial spies, assembled depots of guns and gas bombs, established barricades, controlled their communities with armed thugs, leased the police power of cities, and mobilized the military power of a state to guard them against the intrusion of collective bargaining within their plants.

During this strike eighteen steel workers were either shot to death or had their brains clubbed out by police, or armed thugs in the pay of the steel companies. . . .

The steel workers have now buried their dead, while the widows weep and watch their orphaned children become objects of public charity. The murder of these unarmed men has never been publicly rebuked by any authoritative officer of the state or federal government. Some of them, in extenuation, plead lack of jurisdiction, but murder as a crime against the moral code can always be rebuked without regard to the niceties of legalistic jurisdiction by those who profess to be the keepers of the public conscience.

[Tom] Girdler, of Republic Steel, in the quiet of his bedchamber, doubtless shrills his psychopathic cackles as he files notches on his corporate gun and views in retrospect the ruthless work of his mercenary killers. . . .

The United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and similar groups representing industry and financial interests are rendering a disservice to the American people in their attempts to frustrate the organization of labor and in their refusal to accept collective bargaining as one of our economic institutions.

These groups are encouraging a systematic organization of vigilante groups to fight unionization under the sham pretext of local interests. They equip these vigilantes with tin hats, wooden clubs, gas masks, and lethal weapons, and train them in the arts of brutality and oppression. They bring in snoops, finks [strikebreakers], hatchet gangs, and Chowderhead Cohens to infest their plants and disturb the communities.

Fascist organizations have been launched and financed under the shabby pretext that the C.I.O. movement is Communistic. The real breeders of discontent and alien doctrines of government and philosophies subversive of good citizenship are such as these who take the law into their own hands. No tin-hat brigade of goose-stepping vigilantes or bibble-babbling mob of blackguarding and corporation-paid scoundrels will prevent the onward march of labor, or divert its purpose to play its natural and rational part in the development of the economic, political, and social life of our nation. . . .

Do those who have hatched this foolish cry of Communism in the C.I.O. fear the increased influence of labor in our democracy? Do they fear its influence will be cast on the side of shorter hours, a better system of distributed employment, better homes for the underprivileged, social security for the aged, a fairer distribution of the national income?

Certainly the workers that are being organized want a voice in the determination of these objectives of social justice.

Vital Speeches 3 (September 15, 1937): 731 (speech of September 3, 1937).

Harold Ickes Defends His Chief (1937)
The ultraconservative Supreme Court had repeatedly overthrown crucial New Deal measures for economic and social reform. Roosevelt, intoxicated by his heady majorities of 1932, 1934, and 1936, concluded that in a true democracy the "horse-and-buggy" Court ought to catch up with the will of the people. Two weeks after his second inauguration, he sprang his clever Supreme Court scheme on a surprised Congress and nation. Among other changes, he proposed increasing the membership of the Court from nine to fifteen by appointing additional (New Deal) justices to offset those aged seventy or more who were unwilling to retire. Critics cried that this was "packing" the Court; supporters replied that this was "unpacking" the Court by offsetting reactionaries. "Honest Harold" Ickes, the acid-tongued secretary of the interior, here tells how he defended Roosevelt before an audience of Texans. Given that the Court scheme had not received mention in the Democratic platform or in Roosevelt's speeches during the recent campaign of 1936, how persuasive is Ickes's argument regarding a popular mandate?

Then I switched to a discussion of the constitutional situation, with special reference to the recent proposal of the President to change the judiciary system. I could hear a gasp go up as I disclosed my purpose to discuss this issue. A week or ten days ago the Texas State Senate, with only three or four votes opposing, had gone on record as being against the President's proposal. The House decided neither to approve nor disapprove.

I waded right into the constitutional issue with both feet. In my first sentence I asked where had the Supreme Court gotten its supposed power to pass upon the constitutionality of acts of Congress. I read the Tenth Amendment and then I said that this power had been usurped.*

I then went on to discuss the supposed checks and balances in our tripartite Federal system, pointing out that while there were ample checks and balances with respect to the legislative and executive branches, there wasn't a single check on the judiciary except that of impeachment, which was slow and cumbersome and of doubtful efficacy when it came to a court of nine men. I remarked in passing that one could not be impeached for being too old, that that was not a crime but merely a misfortune.

I argued that the people had given the President a mandate at the last election to provide them with such social and economic legislation as is implicit in the term "New Deal." I said that he would be recreant to his trust if he didn't do all within his power to give the people what he had promised them and what they had shown so unmistakably that they wanted.

I expressed the opinion that the people wanted the benefits of the New Deal now. I pointed out that while those who are opposing the President pretend to do it on the basis that a constitutional amendment is the proper procedure, it would take all of twenty years to get such an amendment through.

With respect to an act or acts of Congress limiting the powers of the Supreme Court so as to provide, for instance, that no law could be held to be unconstitutional except on a two-thirds or three-quarters majority, I ventured to predict that any such law would be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and therefore would be ineffective.

*The Tenth Amendment reserved undelegated powers to the states, but the function of judicial review, "usurped" by the Supreme Court, is generally regarded as implicit in the views of the Founding Fathers and in the Constitution.

The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, vol. 2, p. 80.

Dorothy Thompson Dissents (1937)
As the battle over the Supreme Court mounted, critics accused Roosevelt of perverting the Constitution by destroying the delicate checks and balances, of undermining the integrity and independence of the judiciary, and of grooming himself for dictatorship. Even many New Dealers preferred an unhurried constitutional amendment to a hurried act of Congress. Perhaps most damaging was the suggestion of "slickness," together with Roosevelt's argument, based on false information, that the aged justices were behind in their work. Dorothy Thompson, a noted and respected columnist, sounded the following clarion call. How sound is her view that the people must be protected against fickle majorities and that haste is not necessary?

If the American people accept this last audacity of the President without letting out a yell to high heaven, they have ceased to be jealous of their liberties and are ripe for ruin.

This is the beginning of pure personal government. Do you want it? Do you like it? Look around about the world--there are plenty of examples [e.g., Hitler]--and make up your mind.

The Executive is already powerful by reason of his overwhelming victory in November, and will be strengthened even more if the reorganization plan for the administration, presented some weeks ago, is adopted. We have, to all intents and purposes, a one-party Congress, dominated by the President. Although nearly 40 percent of the voters repudiated the New Deal at the polls, they have less than 20 percent representation in both houses of Congress. And now the Supreme Court is to have a majority determined by the President and by a Senate which he dominates.

When that happens we will have a one-man Government. It will all be constitutional. So, he claims, is Herr Hitler.

Leave the personality and the intentions of the President out of the picture. They are not the crux of this issue. He may be as wise as Solon, lofty as Plato, and pure as Parsifal. He may have the liberties of the American people deeply at heart. But he will have a successor who may be none of these things. There have been benevolent dictatorships and benevolent tyrannies. They have even, at times in history, worked for the popular welfare. But that is not the welfare which, up to now, the American people have chosen.

And let us not be confused by the words "liberal" and "conservative" or misled into thinking that the expressed will of the majority is the essence of democracy. By that definition Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini are all great democratic leaders. The essence of democracy is the protection of minorities.

Nor has a majority of this generation the right to mortgage a majority of the next. In the Constitution of the United States are incorporated the rights of the people, rights enjoyed by every American citizen in perpetuity, which cannot be voted away by any majority, ever.

Majorities are temporary things. The Supreme Court is there to protect the fundamental law even against the momentary "will of the people." That is its function. And it is precisely because nine men can walk out and say: "You can't do that!" that our liberties are protected against the mob urge that occasionally overcomes democracies. That is why the Supreme Court has been traditionally divorced from momentary majorities. . . .

The Constitution can be changed. There are ways provided for doing so. To change it will require much deliberation, debate, time. And what is wrong with deliberation and debate and time? What is the hurry? Under what threat are we living at this instant?

This is no proposal to change the Constitution. This is no proposal to limit the powers of the Supreme Court. This is a proposal to capture the Supreme Court. . . .

If, of the six men over 70, four had been "liberals" and two "conservatives," instead of the other way around, do you think that this program would have been proposed? . . .

Don't talk of liberalism! The liberal does not believe that the end justifies the means. Long experience has taught him that the means usually determine the end. No human being can believe in the sincerity of this proposal. It is clever, in a world sick of cleverness and longing for plain talk and simple honesty. Must we begin to examine every message from the President to see whether there is a trick in it somewhere?

[Roosevelt threw all his weight behind the Supreme Court reform but suffered his most severe political setback when he lost out on the packing feature. He underestimated popular reverence for the Court. But he did win certain other judicial reforms, the Supreme Court did shift to a more liberal position, and within four years he had filled seven vacancies with younger men. He lost a battle but in the end won the war. Yet he lost essential legislative support in Congress.]

Washington Star, February 10, 1937, quoted in Congressional Digest 16 (March 1937): 96.

Republicans Roast Roosevelt (1940)
The Roosevelt-Willkie presidential campaign of 1940 generated new bitterness. Roosevelt's challenge to the third-term tradition, combined with his unsuccessful attempt to pack the Supreme Court and purge certain members of Congress hostile to him, accentuated fears of dictatorship. The Democrats argued that Roosevelt had saved capitalism by averting, whatever the monetary cost and confusion, a revolutionary uprising. The Republican platform, invoking the Preamble to the Constitution, found the New Deal wanting on many counts. In the light of subsequent developments, which is the more valid accusation?

Instead of leading us into More Perfect Union, the Administration has deliberately fanned the flames of class hatred.

Instead of the Establishment of Justice the Administration has sought the subjection of the Judiciary to Executive discipline and domination.

Instead of insuring Domestic Tranquillity, the Administration has made impossible the normal friendly relation between employers and employees, and has even succeeded in alienating both the great divisions of Organized Labor.

Instead of Providing for the Common Defense, the Administration, notwithstanding the expenditure of billions of our dollars, has left the Nation unprepared to resist foreign attack.

Instead of promoting the General Welfare, the Administration has Domesticated the Deficit, Doubled the Debt, Imposed Taxes where they do the greatest economic harm, and used public money for partisan political advantage.

Instead of the Blessings of Liberty, the Administration has imposed upon us a Regime of Regimentation which has deprived the individual of his freedom and has made of America a shackled giant.

Wholly ignoring these great objectives, as solemnly declared by the people of the United States [in the Constitution], the New Deal Administration has for seven long years whirled in a turmoil of shifting, contradictory, and overlapping administrations and policies. Confusion has reigned supreme. The only steady undeviating characteristic has been the relentless expansion of the power of the Federal government over the everyday life of the farmer, the industrial worker, and the businessman. The emergency demands organization--not confusion. It demands free and intelligent cooperation--not incompetent domination. It demands a change.

The New Deal Administration has failed America.

It has failed by seducing our people to become continuously dependent upon government, thus weakening their morale and quenching the traditional American spirit.

K. H. Porter and D. B. Johnson, eds., National Party Platforms, 1840-1956 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1961).