Reformers in Retreat
LASSER, WILLLAM
Reformers in Retreat The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power from FDR to LBJ By Michael Janeway Columbia. 284 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by William Lasser Professor of...
...More fundamentally, he gives the impression of having accepted the New Deal view that the success of the national economy depends heavily on the policies of the national government...
...A victim of both internal forces and external events, it now lies in ruins, its promise and practice of reform politics a distant memory...
...Reviewed by William Lasser Professor of political science, Clemson University Franklin D. Roosevelt's ancestral home in Hyde Park, New York, has been lovingly preserved through the decades, a virtual shrine to the 32nd President...
...The guests were a who's who of postwar America— writers, artists, actors, business leaders, and, of course, politicians and public officials...
...At the same time, Bush and his fellow conservatives have mounted a populist assault on the government itself, attacking the arrogance and elitism of bureaucrats, journalists, and the rest of the "inside the Beltway" crowd...
...The New Dealers, including Corcoran and Janeway, pushed Justice Douglas...
...Above all, Janeway paints a graphic and colorful picture of the New Dealers in action...
...Can the energy and enthusiasm of a new brain trust be harnessed to solve the myriad problems facing the United States today...
...Ironically, the closest parallel was the group of "neoconservative and free market libertarians" President Ronald Reagan assembled in an effort to reverse Roosevelt's accomplishments...
...He is especially good at describing (and trying to understand) his father, whose New Deal activities have rarely received theattention they deserve...
...He is more successful in tracing the internal disintegration of FDR's inner circle...
...Every six or eight weeks my parents gave a large party," recalls the author, "which we were allowed, even encouraged, to join...
...The House of Roosevelt collapsed in two different senses, the author contends...
...He had a brilliant and penetrating mind, but never graduated from college...
...They waged a war on poverty, championed the Civil Rights Movement, fought on behalf of laborers and labor unions, and tried to check the abuse of corporate power...
...Despite his abandoning the Communist ideology, he retained a touch of Marx' rhetorical flair—a "didactic, epigrammatic style," writes his son, "was one of my father's signature touches...
...Janeway is able to pierce the veil of privacy that often surrounded the New Dealers' clique...
...The contest for the 1944 Vice Presidential nomination foreshadowed the eventual breakdown of Roosevelt's network...
...The members of the House of Roosevelt were a varied lot...
...He also provides a vivid account of Lyndon Johnson's final decade—his failed bid for the Presidency in 1960, his years of frustration as Vice President, and his tumultuous, and ultimately crushing, years in the White House...
...And the country has never again produced a set of "brilliant, dedicated reformers in Washington to attack social, economic, technological, and international dilemmas...
...Others joined at various points along the way: Johnson, for example, was first elected to Congress in 1937...
...After flirting with Communism, he signed on as business editor of Time magazine under Henry Luce...
...Tommy Corcoran faced at least four major investigations into misconduct and impropriety, with the last involving his extraordinary attempt to lobby several New Deal croniestumed-Supreme Court justices on behalf of a legal client...
...He relates his father's 1944 removal of Wendell L. Willkie, then seeking a second turn as the Republican Presidential candidate, from the apartment of a family friend, actress Miriam Hopkins...
...Explicitly the subject would be the contest, the angles, the issues, the odds, money...
...From his unlikely post at Time the elder Janeway moved into the New Dealers' ranks, then took advantage of his access to inside information to create a lucrative newsletter business...
...In their role as liberal reformers, the members of the House of Roosevelt aimed to serve the downtrodden and the oppressed...
...Implicitly it was the question of influence and leverage next week, next month, next year...
...The New Deal created an activist government, he writes, but failed to build social democracy to foster it...
...He played political kingmaker to "an odd lot" of politicians—Democrats, anti-Establishment Republicans, "or someone he'd been known to scorn but with whom—spin of the dial—he was now in tactical conjunction...
...Labor backed incumbent Vice President Henry A. Wallace...
...The 1944 battle, like those that followed, was partly about the future course of New Deal liberalism...
...His political connections were complemented by his wife's connections to the worlds of literature and the arts (Elizabeth Janeway was a best-selling novelist in her own right...
...Reagan's Republican successors have appeared to embrace many aspects of both camps...
...On the other hand, that legacy has been marred by the lies and deceptions of Vietnam, his grand and petty abuses of power, and a long trail of corruption in both the private and public spheres...
...Can the spirit of New Deal liberalism be revived in the 21 st century...
...Although born Jewish, he kept his background a closely guarded secret, even from his own son...
...He has a scholar's penchant for research and objective analysis, as well as a reporter's eye for nuance and detail...
...But it was also about political power and the achievement of insider states, as the book makes particularly plain in the case of Eliot Janeway...
...From the first days of the New Deal until the end of Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidency, the House of Roosevelt was home to such legendary Washington figures as William O. Douglas, Abe Fortas, Benjamin V Cohen, Tommy ("the Cork") Corcoran, James Rowe, and Jerome Frank...
...On the one hand, he is remembered for his noble efforts on behalf of civil rights, and for his defining vision of the Great Society...
...Of them all, Eliot Janeway may have been the most unusual...
...The Federal bureaucracy grew from a force for action into what the political scientist Theodore Lowi called an "ungovernable...
...But each had a shared commitment to the persona and the political agenda of FDR...
...Others are new...
...It is Lyndon Johnson, however, who epitomizes the New Dealers' split personality...
...In addition, conflict among the various factions that made up the New Deal coalition became much worse over time, especially as Roosevelt's health failed toward the end of World War II...
...Janeway portrays the core of FDR's team as "a political version of the old Wall Street trusts"—the House of Morgan, for example—a "cooperative venture" of "mostly unpedigreed, upwardly mobile New Dealers...
...But in the conduct of their own lives and in the way they practiced politics, they thrived on privilege, inside access, and behind-the-scenes deal makmg...
...Janeway is justifiably pessimistic...
...The usual suspects are rounded up—Vietnam, Watergate, television, the bureaucratization of government—but Janeway gives these external pressures little more than passing treatment...
...They included Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and nonbelievers...
...And the dual Republican strategy, cynical as it may be, has so far proved successful...
...They were lawyers, journalists, economists, politicians, and business executives...
...They came from New York and New England, Texas and Tennessee, Indiana and Washington State...
...morass...
...He draws from personal experience, too, having grown up at the center of this coterie and been a staff aide to Senator Lyndon Johnson in the late 1950s and early '60s...
...Willkie quit the race, and the elder Janeway never reported the incident...
...Some, like Cohen and Corcoran, were with Roosevelt from the start...
...Clark Clifford's brilliant career ended in disgrace, when he was linked to a major banking scandal in the 1980s...
...Abe Fortas' financial dealings forced him off the Court...
...The first one will be familiar: "In the last quarter of the 20th century American politics began to cease to function as a blend of broad coalition building and reform agenda setting, rooted in a consensus belief in the efficacy of modem government...
...President George W. Bush, for instance, likes to speak of "improving" Medicare and Social Security, and promotes Keynesian tax cuts and spending projects...
...The result is an engaging book, with a tragic ending that leaves little hope for a revival of a New Deal-style reform politics...
...The author—who teaches at Columbia University's School of Journalism and has served as editor of both the Atlantic Monthly and the Boston Globe— is ideally suited to telling the New Dealers' story...
...To be around my father," he writes, "was to be witness to the hum of the diverse machinery of influence...
...Having resisted Willkie's advances by knocking him unconscious with a table lamp, Hopkins called Eliot Janeway, who ushered him "discreetly out to elegant Sutton Place and into a taxi...
...In the exercise of political muscle and in the pursuit of wealth, several of the New Dealers came to think that the rules did not apply to them...
...For that the New Dealers must take a share of the blame...
...The party leadership, unhappy with all of the above, settled on Harry S. Truman, the eventual nominee...
...But the metaphorical House of Roosevelt chronicled by Michael Janeway did not fare so well...
...Some of his tales are old ones, retold with style and grace...
...Southerners supported James F. Byrnes, the former South Carolina Senator and Supreme Court Justice then serving as Director of War Mobilization...
...As Eliot Janeway might have put it, in doing so they sowed the seeds of their own destruction...
...It also included Janeway's father, Eliot...
...The New Dealers were never a coherent group, and tensions surfaced even in the early 1930s...
Vol. 87 • March 2004 • No. 2
