Nothing to Fear But FDR

By coincidence or design, here in the midst of our latest presidential election are two books about the battles of a previous president. The ways in which he prevailed will interest all who study the presidency and may even entice us to speculate how our present candidates would confront similar-challenges — for the president in question is Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of the shrewdest politicians in American history.

In Once Upon a Time in New York: Jimmy Walker, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Last Great Battle of the Jazz Age, Herbert Mitgang tells the story of Roosevelt’s resolution of a threat to his 1932 Democratic presidential nomination: the charges of corruption leveled against the popular New York City mayor, Jimmy Walker. Each of Roosevelt’s options entailed risk. As governor, he had the authority to remove Walker from office. If he did, he would certainly anger Walker’s Tammany Hall allies, ruining his ability to lead a united New York delegation to the Democratic National Convention. If he did not, he risked alienating western progressives and southern agrarians who detested all Tammany symbolized.

In FDR and His Enemies, Albert Fried discusses five other men who put obstacles in Roosevelt’s path. These were Alfred E. Smith, his predecessor both as governor of New York and Democratic presidential nominee; Father Charles E. Coughlin, the popular radio priest; Huey Long, governor of Louisiana and erstwhile populist; John L. Lewis, president of the mineworkers’ union and founder of the CIO; and Charles A. Lindbergh, aviator and national hero. Each of these men represented an alternative to Roosevelt’s policies. The potential damage to him came from their popularity, their special appeal to significant elements of Roosevelt’s constituencies, and their ability to exploit the communication tools at which Roosevelt had proved a master, primarily radio.

Unlike the avowed enemies, however, Jimmy Walker never intended to block Roosevelt’s path. The Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court triggered that turn in 1930, when it named retired Court of Appeals judge Samuel Seabury to investigate irregularities in the city’s courts. Seabury insisted on and received permission to carry his probe into “any and all dark corners.” After he demonstrated that a sheriff had accumulated $ 500,000 over six years on an annual salary of $ 8,500, Roosevelt removed the sheriff from office. When the Manhattan district attorney came under fire for his office’s cavalier attitude toward racketeering, graft, and kickbacks, Roosevelt invited Seabury to investigate as his personal “commissioner.” Before long, the Republican State Legislature granted Seabury permission to examine the activities of every official in New York City’s government.

Seabury’s investigation invites comparison with Kenneth Starr’s more than sixty years later. Jimmy Walker and his henchmen could have written the playbook followed by James Carville, Lanny Davis, and the rest of Clinton’s team. (Courtesy of the sixty lawyers and researchers in Clinton’s White House Counsel’s office, perhaps they did.) Seabury understood at the outset that, given the notoriety and popularity of his target, he had to win his case in both the courtroom and the court of public opinion. He said at the first gathering of his staff, “The public will not be aroused to an awareness of conditions . . . through a series of graphs, charts, and reports. We must divorce this investigation, as far as is possible, from legalistic machinery.”

Mindful that he would present his findings to an elected official, Seabury kept Roosevelt abreast of his progress. He retained as his consultant Columbia professor Raymond Moley, who was simultaneously assembling the “brain trust” that would follow Roosevelt to Washington. Seabury proved especially adept at cultivating the press to assist his investigation. His staff provided “special treatment” to reporters who located missing witnesses and leaked information to favored columnists and broadcasters.

Seabury also anticipated the kind of defense Tammany Hall would mount. Walker moved quickly to besmirch the prosecutor, to accuse his opponents of partisan motives, to draw attention to the cost and duration of the publicly financed inquiry, to castigate the probe as a thinly veiled attempt to overturn the results of an election, and to insist that the prosecutor was prying into private life rather than public deeds.

When Walker talked about “private life,” he meant the source of his secret bank accounts and the financing of his luxury apartment and trips abroad. He maintained that as long as those were not public funds, they were no one’s affair but his. Walker was less concerned about the publicizing of other aspects of his private life, such as his public visits to speakeasies with his mistress, show-girl Betty Compton — though he brought his long-estranged wife to sit behind him at the hearing Roosevelt called in the governor’s chambers. Other arrows in the Walker quiver were the claims that attacks on his integrity “besmirched the character of 130,000 city employees” and had “undermined the goodwill and financial standing of the city.” His most creative line of defense was that he could not be removed in his second term for illegalities he had committed in his first.

Neither Roosevelt nor Seabury was surprised that Walker preferred to play to the stands rather than address the allegations against him. His defenders mounted rallies complete with bands whenever he came to Albany. Inside the governor’s chambers and without, Walker presented himself as a victim of financial interests seeking to overturn the decision of the voters to retain him as mayor. Rarely did he miss an opportunity to link Seabury and Roosevelt to “Wall Street interests” and himself to New York’s downtrodden.

But Roosevelt won plaudits even from his political detractors for his (undoubtedly rehearsed) decorum throughout the proceedings. And when it appeared Roosevelt was ready to act, Walker — perhaps pushed by Democrats sensing the tide had turned in Roosevelt’s direction and unwilling to jeopardize future federal patronage — abruptly resigned as mayor. He threatened to seek vindication by running in the special election to fill the office he had vacated. Instead, he departed for Europe, where he remained until he was certain he would not be prosecuted.

In Once Upon a Time in New York, Mitgang does not speculate about what role Roosevelt played behind the scenes to produce this outcome. Given that all the central figures in the case — Roosevelt, Walker, and Seabury — were Democrats, Roosevelt may have operated through other players in the party. Such at least is the pattern described in FDR and His Enemies. As Fried shows, Roosevelt rarely confronted his enemies head-on. His preferred methods were to attack them through surrogates (a favorite was Interior secretary Harold Ickes) or work behind the scenes through third parties. When he appeared to throw himself into the thick of things, it usually came in a carefully crafted quip at a press conference in response to a planted question.

Two of Roosevelt’s opponents, Coughlin and Lewis, would gladly have settled for bringing Roosevelt down, while Smith and Long saw themselves as possible replacements (Lindbergh might have as well, had he not found the theatrics of democratic politics abhorrent). If they had been able to transcend their differences and work in concert — or if Roosevelt had been less adept at exploiting their weaknesses, goading them to self-destruction, or constructing traps for them to fall into — they might well have succeeded.

As he launched the New Deal, Roosevelt found himself besieged with criticism from both the right and left. Long and Coughlin dismissed Roosevelt’s plans as palliatives that would not redress the economic disaster of the Great Depression. Long proposed immediate redistribution of the nation’s assets (indeed, the increasing “radicalism” of the New Deal may derive from Roosevelt’s desire to prevent Long from gaining a foothold in his natural constituency). Coughlin preferred to blame the nation’s ills on financiers, Jews, and bankers, who, he insisted, hoarded precious commodities, thereby creating shortages.

Angered at Roosevelt’s failure to consult him and perhaps jealous that his protege had leapt ahead of him on the political ladder, Smith drew closer to the people Roosevelt, Long, and Coughlin alike called the “economic royalists.” Through the Liberty Lobby, Smith (whose years as governor historians often cite as the state precedent for the New Deal) railed against deficit spending, increased federal power, unaccountable powerful bureaucracies, and the decline of individual initiative.

Of Roosevelt’s three domestic critics, Long represented the most immediate threat, especially within the Democratic party. After an assassin’s bullet silenced Long, Coughlin became Roosevelt’s leading rival on the left. Eschewing direct confrontation with a popular radio personality, Roosevelt attacked him through others. He banked that the priest would overestimate his influence with his radio audience and overreach. This he did when he boasted that his handpicked third party candidate William Lemke would pull nine million votes in the 1936 election. When he attained less than a tenth of that, the priest, temporarily keeping a promise, voluntarily departed the airwaves. Smith made a similar mistake when he “took a walk” and endorsed Roosevelt’s Republican opponent, Alf Landon. Smith’s real ability to harm Roosevelt was within the Democratic party, and his departure from the fold left the president the master of that house.

It was in his duel with isolationists that Roosevelt proved most skillful. An ally of Roosevelt on domestic matters, John L. Lewis nonetheless rejected the president’s plan to aid Britain and France. He saw little need to send American youths to assist “imperialist” nations and lambasted Roosevelt for investigating “fifth columns.” Though the rest of the left rejected isolationism after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Lewis clung to his position and even endorsed Roosevelt’s 1940 opponent, Wendell Willkie.

Father Coughlin returned to the air two months after his voluntary exile. But his anti-Semitic outbursts and pro-Axis sympathies were drawing criticism from American Catholics. Once the United States had entered World War II, the Justice Department sought to censor Coughlin periodicals it considered seditious.

Eventually his archbishop ordered Coughlin to cease commenting about politics. Fried suggests the archbishop acted at the request of a delegation of lay Catholics close to Roosevelt — though he paints a picture of the archbishop, disgusted with Coughlin, eagerly awaiting their visit.

Of all the characters covered in these two books, Roosevelt had his most serious confrontation with Charles Lindbergh. How he orchestrated his showdown with the famous aviator illustrates his leadership style. It was also important because, of all his foes, only Lindbergh offered a competing vision of how the United States should face the great crisis of the twentieth century. Moreover, Lindbergh had at his command more resources with which to take on Roosevelt than any of the president’s other tormentors.

While neither a Nazi nor a fascist, Lindbergh convinced himself that Germany would prevail in its conquest of Europe. He urged Britain and France not to resist what he insisted was its superior airpower and argued strenuously against American intervention. Lindbergh was hardly the only isolationist to hold these views.

But he went further than most when he insisted that Nazi Germany could be a force for good in the world by bringing to heel an even greater menace, Stalin’s Soviet Union. He insisted that Britain and France had been wrong to go to war in defense of Poland — for if they had not, he argued, Hitler would have invaded Russia earlier than he did.

After Congress passed by a wide margin Roosevelt’s lend-lease assistance (Lindbergh had testified against it), the president decided it was safe to make his move. Ickes denounced Lindbergh as a “provocateur,” a “fellow traveler,” and an “appeaser,” while Roosevelt “off the record” suggested reporters ascertain his feelings on the subject. When asked why Lindbergh had not been called up to active duty as other reserve officers had, Roosevelt reminded them of why union forces could not fully trust Copperheads who held government posts during the Civil War. Angered, insulted, and provoked, Lindbergh hastily resigned his commission in the Army Air Corps.

Insisting that Lindbergh’s function was to “knock down the will of his fellow citizens to resist Hitler,” Ickes began referring to him as the “Knight of the German Eagle,” referring to a medal Hermann Goering had given Lindbergh before the war. When Lindbergh sought readmission to the Army during World War II, Secretary Henry L. Stimson wrote that he was “personally unwilling to place in command any man who had such a lack of faith in our cause.” Whether because he shared Stimson’s assessment or was just indulging his own vindictiveness, Roosevelt kept him out.

Both Mitgang and Fried end their works by hailing the changes Roosevelt brought to American politics. Mitgang credits him with creating a “welfare” state that “actually preserved the American free enterprise system.” Fried sees him as an instrument of the “modern state, centralized and ever-expanding, as guarantor of social justice and national security.”

But the real lesson of Franklin Roosevelt, taught in Once Upon a Time in New York and FDR and His Enemies, is that steering the ship of state requires a chief executive of Rooseveltian skill, flexibility, and cunning.

Alvin S. Felzenberg is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation.