Inside FDR's Brain Trust
JR., ADOLF A. BERLE
Inside FDR's Brain Trust The Democratic Roosevelt. Reviewed by Adolf A. Berle Jr. By Rexford G. Tugwell. RFC counseL m3. Assistmlt Secretary of Doubleday. 712 pp. $8.50. State, 1938-44; professor...
...Justice Brandeis and a more modern strain of economic thinking...
...I wrote some of the ensuing documents...
...his battles, his politics, his measures, even his compromising, were for them...
...there is no point reviewing from any other basis...
...In the latter case, he tried to take businessmen into partnership, but, as Tugwell puts it, they at once began to think that they were "senior," not "junior," partners and the attempt failed...
...A new organization and a new generation with new virtues and new failings was emerging in business...
...Had Franklin Roosevelt created a "Progressive party" it might not have been cast in the lines either of the old Brandeis teaching or of the Harry Hopkins-Rex Tugwell-Aubrey Williams concepts...
...and he was there...
...professor of law, Columbia U. Rexford Tugwell was one of Franklin Roosevelt's close advisers and friends through the campaign of 1932 and his first term of office...
...Big business was quite willing to accept organized economy, but only if it did the organizing and dominated that economy...
...He lived in his time...
...The biography here presented is, therefore, less history (despite Tugwell's scrupulous attempt to make it so) than a first-person-singular document in the case—a "first source...
...Rex could not have known the rest of the story—it has never been printed—and only Roosevelt knew what advice was determinative...
...He was working toward a democratically planned economy...
...Essentially, the lines were drawn between the men (including this reviewer) who did believe the economy had to be organized, and those who believed that reversal of the tide toward big business and big organization would automatically recreate the balance...
...He increased its size, but followed its general line...
...In a non-socialist country like America, the attempt to work out a cooperative relationship between business and Government represented by NRA was logical—a premature attempt at planning which failed...
...Roosevelt was primarily interested in what happened to people...
...that the old 19th-century theory of balance of small-scale interests in the open market no longer worked...
...It is doubtful, I think, that Franklin ever believed in this as a system...
...But it also involved a more serious struggle inside the Democratic party which Tugwell sees as a contest between the followers of the late Mr...
...The involved observer cannot help seeing the drama in terms of his own experience: He inevitably tells what he knows rather than the whole story...
...But, as Rex's friends used to say of this reviewer: "Berle always had the fatal weakness of thinking that big businessmen might become good...
...and his time knew it, and knew him...
...Economically and philosophically, as Rex sees it, President Roosevelt and the Democratic party with him were being slowly converted to the fact that the American economy was now a national institution...
...Even now it is being succeeded by a more inclusive, less detailed, more gradualist but more successful system of planning which in 1957 is more advanced than most people realize...
...In essence, he tried to tame it and at the same time wished to annex the classical progressives to a new orientation...
...Thereafter, as Fiorello LaGuardia's Chairman of the New York City Planning Commission and later as Governor of Puerto Rico, he had continuous White House contact...
...He thinks that with more patience and care the differences between the West and the Soviet Union which now appear as the "Iron Curtain" and the Cold War might have been compromised by his successor—for which there is very little evidence...
...I would have the same difficulty (and, I hope, equal merit of careful and accurate statement) if I were to attempt a like job...
...Tugwell's interpretation here is of first importance...
...It is true he had to appease the reactionaries...
...A program of public works spending was adopted, and Rex considers that this conference resolved the question...
...From the historian's view, some comments Tugwell makes are not justified...
...Perhaps you found out later the real source of policy...
...In the closing days of his life, Tugwell thinks Roosevelt was telling himself "how he would act when the peace treaties were ratified...
...and, together at last with his natural friends, he would go forward to the work for the world yet to be done...
...The progressives "wanted to implement Brandeis's faith that littleness was a cure-all...
...But Rex and Hull were not congenial...
...reduction once more to small units would cause competition and "competition is a policy...
...in main outline it is right, though Bran-deis's thinking went farther, I believe, than Tugwell would concede...
...He would then notify the reactionaries that compromising was done with, past...
...Historically, such a political struggle has been endemic to the United States...
...Franklin Roosevelt habitually had several groups working on problems at the same time, frequently without telling any of them of the work of the others, and he selected from the proposed solutions or coordinated the results as the case might be...
...But must it be eternally projected...
...Traditional American "progressives" were anti-big business, had no real interest in an organized economy and would not go along except on their own terms...
...Their business is to make that economic system ethically, humanely and practically just and workable...
...Rex naturally sees the New Deal through his eyes...
...Tug-well has provided here an essential and invaluable body of observation and material which must enter into the endless stream of scholarly study of the Roosevelt era...
...The progressives he had so long held at arm's length would then be ingathered...
...This was especially true of the Roosevelt Government...
...In my view, the Roosevelt era reflected the dying convulsions of irresponsible 19th-century capitalism...
...The biography as an interpretation of foreign affairs is fascinating and deserves careful reading...
...the final plan was probably a mixture...
...Tugwell was one of their chief representatives...
...Non-socialist governments cannot, after all, be perpetually at war with their economic system...
...Factually, died-in-the-wool reactionaries, angry at social progress, are now strongest in the ranks of small business and of certain agricultural and natural-resource industries...
...He was considering what form postwar economic organization would take...
...Rex notes, rightly, the endless struggles of progressive Democrats against the type of thought represented, say, by Senator Harry Byrd and other Southern Democrats...
...He attributes the progress made at Yalta and the establishment of the United Nations entirely to Franklin Roosevelt's initiative...
...In the Brandeis conception, as Tug-well saw it, bigness in business caused inefficiency...
...they controlled the Congress and also the political machinery of both parties...
...Immediately after that, business organized against the President permanently...
...Meeting with the Under Secretary of the Treasury and the Acting Head of the Federal Reserve Board, we agreed that deficit spending was better than more depression, worked out a program and submitted it to the President...
...Rex's book is really a double study of the technique of politics and the application of politics to various problems...
...Excellent illustration is provided in one of Rex's pages, which tells how American national income took a tailspin in the recession of 1937-38...
...He therefore changed from the "first" New Deal to the second and hoped to initiate an aggressive campaign to break up big business...
...This ignores the endless and patient work of Cordell Hull in Moscow in 1943...
...The war prevented raising internal social issues and great international issues at the same time in the campaigns of 1940 and 1944...
...Contemporary personal records are among the best sources of history, but one word of caution is in order...
...no one else saw as much of it...
...that an organization capable of guiding the economy was essential...
...Rex Tugwell is to be congratulated on a chronicle which will be a continuing source of Rooseveltian history and on an incisive interpretation of the clashing currents of yesterday which have produced the America of today...
...But he ran into trouble...
...It made him, and he helped to make it, setting the stage for the drama of today...
...Now the first New Deal was the kind of situation so big that no contemporary could know all of it...
...On the other side were men who believed in a larger-scale, more collectivized approach...
...Roosevelt was now convinced that the American people would not go into partnership with "Big Business...
...My feeling is that Roosevelt, in a massive situation, was attempting to maintain unified support for the war effort and for his dreams of organizing a future peace...
...So Rex saw it: The inevitable struggle between old and new progressives (with business between both), adjourned to win a war and organize a peace, would begin once more at war's end...
...Roosevelt was building on Hopkins, LaFollette and LaGuardia—later, of course, on other men, notably Willkie...
...The struggle was at its height when cut short by the crushing necessities of the impending World War II...
...He was, Rex believes, adopting "collectivism" in the AAA and the NRA...
...The authority of Tugwell's book (and this review) is derived from personal connection with a smashing piece of history in which we were all involved...
...I can only write another document in the case...
...Roosevelt, of course, was listening to all groups...
...Conventional review is as impossible for me as detached biography is for Tugwell...
...This over-simplifies the thesis...
...From 1936 on, the Democratic party was a coalition "so deeply divided that to hold it together [Roosevelt] would be compelled to go on compromising and temporizing...
...the Brandeis men dominated the second administration and caused the "second New Deal," in which Tugwell himself—by now the Number One enemy both of the Brandeis men and of the old business group—believed he could play no part...
...He began, Rex thinks, a series of moves from which he hoped to erect a true progressive party, discarding men like Vice President Garner, Jesse Jones and Cordell Hull...
...This involved a struggle with Republican reactionaries who fundamentally wanted to leave the whole problem to private banking and business...
...Secretary of the Treasury Henry Mor-genthau opposed deficit financing...
...I had been asked to work on the same problem in Washington...
...His ultimate choice of political means would have turned on estimated results in individual human terms...
...But, at the same time...
...Rex thinks Hull was the stalking horse by which the conservative Democrats hoped to recapture the party in 1940...
...Businessmen and Franklin Roosevelt never were reconciled and a rift appeared in the Democratic ranks...
...Roosevelt was cautiously abandoning the Brandeis doctrine that "bigness" was a curse, and was seeking to work out social justice in the modern terms of large-scale organization...
...His statement that Churchill's "prescience about the Russians is largely imaginary" is not borne out by the record recently published in Herbert Feis's documentary history, Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin...
...The problem was whether to let it run, or to use the Federal credit once more, though it meant a deficit...
...The decades following Franklin Roosevelt's death called less for winning political battles than for getting some very fundamental human results...
...If the Democratic party was split into liberal and conservative wings, the liberal wing was itself divided...
...This reviewer was also a member of the Brain Trust, also locked in the New Deal with President Roosevelt, Rex Tugwell and many others...
...Harry Hopkins talked to Leon Henderson, Aubrey Williams and Beards-ley Ruml, fixed up a memorandum and went to Warm Springs...
...The collectivist approach dominated the "first New Deal...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 49
