Roosevelt and the Storm Centers
JR., ADOLF A. BERLE
WRITERS and WRITING Roosevelt and the Storm Centers The Politics of Upheaval. By Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Houghton, Mifflin. 749 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Adolf A. Berle Jr. Assistant Secretary of...
...The climax came in the Schechter case when the National Recovery Act was held unconstitutional...
...As it now moved into a new phase Harold Ickes fell to feuding with Harry Hopkins...
...Uncounted thousands thundered applause...
...One dynamo of demagognery suffered unexpected elimination when Huey Long was assassinated in 1935...
...Of necessity the campaign of 1936 was a referendum on the New Deal...
...Schlesinger thinks there was at this time a main-line shift in ideology —a shift from guided economy toward classical capitalism, aided by deficit financing...
...disillusionment was setting in...
...Author, "Tides of Crisis" THIS THIRD VOLUME of Schlesinger's saga (The Age of Roosevelt) is already on best seller lists...
...In 1934 the great wave of the first New Deal was spent...
...But if Roosevelt made mistakes at this time he could always count on the Republicans—they could make bigger ones...
...Roosevelt met economic catastrophe and the rising tide of Fascist tyranny with debonair and unlimited personal courage—and he met it in American terms...
...American political change comes in cycles whose peaks are about a generation apart...
...In a couple of hand-to-hand actions, Roosevelt drove through a reform of the Federal Reserve System, essentially to Eccles’ liking, which increased the Federal power over money and credit...
...A few idealists were gradually converted into spies and agents...
...The history of this group has yet to be written...
...Conservatives now began to believe they could win the 1936 election after all...
...In part, perhaps, its popularity reflects the country's feeling that a new "age" is beginning...
...The bitter-enders (a bit unjustly to Landon, who was not bitter) made him their candidate in preference to Arthur Vandenberg and Landon promptly started his campaign against the New Deal as a "holy crusade for liberty...
...And there were troubles within as well as outside the Administration...
...Not unnaturally, historians of today see Roosevelt as the prototype of what much of America desires now...
...This adds the piquancy of timeliness to a chronicle of the last great change...
...At least some storm centers had been traversed...
...Even allowing for my own prejudice, I think he is not...
...Aside from him, there was a very honest, wholly decent man, formerly a Bull-Mooser but now solidly conservative, Alfred M. Landon, the only Republican Governor west of the Mississippi elected in 1932...
...Marriner Eccles of the Federal Reserve Board was differing violently on Federal Reserve power and policy with Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, who came down on the side of classical finance...
...Professor Wilbur Cortez Abbott of Harvard concluded his famous biography of Oliver Cromwell with the observation that history in each generation rewrites the saga of a great man in its own terms...
...The New Deal was thus parting company with the intellectual radicals...
...Schlesinger has not done so because the returns are not in...
...The Communist conspiracy, "pallid but vicious" (as Schlesinger calls it), "was a potential challenger to American democracy...
...A number of Soviet-directed, Soviet-financed Communist cells were at work through united front movements, aimed at infiltration of strategic positions and setting up an espionage organization...
...Meanwhile, New Deal doctrine itself was shifting...
...Meanwhile the Communists were also bidding for radical intellectuals...
...Brokers in Marxism like Harold J. Laski and the then pro-Communist John Strachey were at their zenith...
...As Schlesinger writes, America is again meeting a new and more insidious form of economic danger, again with a rising tide, this time Communist...
...The Supreme Court and the Federal courts were dividing on constitutional questions with increasing bitterness...
...I am not sure...
...Under this cover, a real, though feeble, conspiracy developed, unknown at the time...
...Reactionary groups were even beginning to defend the public utility holding companies, and the position of Congress was in doubt...
...This was the year of Father Coughlin broadcasting from Royal Oak, of Huey Long and the "Share the Wealth" campaign, of odd popular movements not encountered in normal American tradition...
...The Frankfurter group was moving in...
...He used the radio, then just developing as a means of communication...
...Historians have asked whether Schlesinger, a careful historian, is not favorable to Roosevelt...
...The utilities problem was solved after an incarnadined fight, by enacting the "death sentence" for holding companies...
...Indeed there are dangerous parallels...
...It was also an era of uncertainty on Capitol Hill, as old Republican Progressives like Burton Wheeler and Bronson Cutting found that, being Republican, they were not welcome in the New Deal camp which was Democratic as well as New Deal...
...Their real hero, of course, was Herbert Hoover, but it was clear he could not be elected...
...However Landon may have felt about social policy, he was slowly engulfed by the rising Hoover mood of his party and associates...
...This foreshadowed trouble ahead: Many of the Western Progressives were also isolationists and their intellectual leaders were John Dewey and Charles Beard...
...I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master...
...the possibilities of new instruments were being explored...
...Transforming Federal relief into a Civil Works Administration had caused controversy...
...But in that kind of campaign, Franklin Roosevelt was in his element...
...When Landon said that "economic planning violates basic American ideals" and would lead to the guillotine, Roosevelt countered by attacking the concentration of economic power...
...His followers were sure the Republic was about to collapse and darkly hinted that in event of a Democratic victory, this would be the last American election...
...They realized it was not to become a Kerensky prelude to their labor trumpet...
...As he spoke, the Social Security law did not look at all like economic oppression...
...The demagogues of Fascism were riding high—somewhat as the demagogues of Communism are beginning to rise in the world today—and they had their echoes in the United States...
...In his first Administration, said Roosevelt, "Forces of selfishness and lust for power met their match...
...Says Schlesinger, "Political campaigns tend to be exercises in progressive degeneration" (I wonder how he feels about it today since he was a major aide in the Kennedy forces...
...At his gay best, he stormed the country...
...Essentially, the group was conservative, wanting a return to the free market and small business, a desire which ran counter to the more aggressive measures of 1932...
...Plenty more lay ahead...
...This was the period of the rise of the theories of John Maynard Keynes...
...Hopkins won (the prize was control of a major share of public works spending), to Ickes' obligato of resignations and savage diary notes and attempts of Roosevelt to reconcile the two...
...Assistant Secretary of State, 1938–44...
...Since intellectual liberals tolerated Communists at that time, they had relatively little opposition...
...In crashing finale he reached his climax...
...At this point Roosevelt really established his stature...
...In national rhythm the Presidential term beginning next year should usher in the next great change...
...Their followers endeavored to equate Roosevelt's New Deal with fascism, but its gradualness and pragmatic quality made it suspect...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 45
