Franklin Do Roosevelt and the New Deal - 29 January 1982

A couple of months ago, a young man, an historian alert to the difference between living history and the history that's frozen in the books, went to Washington to see what Congress and the White House were doing about 30 January, the 100th anniversary of the birth of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He was startled to discover that nothing was being done. Once the word was out, all sorts of ordinary citizens who hadn’t given it a thought were startled too. Whether you loved Roosevelt or hated him, the fact is unavoidable, that, in the shivery decade of the 1930s, when the leaders of Europe were cowed by the rising spectre of Hitler, Roosevelt looked like the only strong defender of liberty and industrial democracy.

And in the following war, he was, with Winston Churchill, one of the two great dominating figures on our side. The avoidance of some official celebration of his birth can hardly have been an oversight. The truth is that when the idea was mooted there was apparently nobody in the administration who wanted to embarrass President Reagan by bringing it up.

How embarrass? Well, since he started campaigning for the presidency and since he’s been in it, Mr Reagan has hammered away at the theme that he was going to reverse 50 years of American history. He was going to cancel the Roosevelt revolution, the creation of a strong central government with direct responsibility for the fundamental needs – shelter, food, housing – of all its citizens. A revolution which sapped the separate and considerable powers of the states and which, Mr Reagan maintained, had produced enormous and ever-rising deficits, had caused all our woe and loss of Eden.

Obviously, it wouldn’t help this crusade to have people recall that Mr Reagan had been a most ardent New Dealer, had himself voted for Roosevelt four times, and had waited till he was on the edge of old age before he saw the light and recognised the great betrayal.

However, the Democrats, who must have been hibernating since the fall, roused themselves. So, said the pundits and historians, so there are belated but jubilant celebrations? President Reagan himself swallowed hard, and suddenly issued invitations to the living traitors – unrepentant Democrats – who knew the great man, journalists, historians, and the like and had them sit down to a commemorative lunch in the White House on Thursday.

From the memories of all the years I watched him, or as a reporter covered his presidency, there is one that stands out like a beacon. It was a drenching day in the autumn of 1936, a day of slamming rain and a blustery wind, that threatened to drown out a great occasion at Harvard University, and the crowd that had gathered in Harvard Yard to celebrate it – the 300th anniversary of the founding of America’s oldest university.

Harvard had invited distinguished scholars and scientists and statement from all over the world; world figures like Einstein and Malinowski and on this day they were clustered in a semicircle, down below a dais constructed for the occasion. Beyond these eminent men, who were sitting bent against the rain with their gowns flapping in the wind, was a great crowd of new graduates, and undergraduates and families and townspeople who had managed to get a ticket and were bobbing around under the thrashing trees, peering for the arrival of the main speaker. The main speaker was to be the President of the United States, no less. And there were many university dignitaries and Harvard men there who wished that the president were not a Harvard man, or, if he happened to be, that he could have been almost anyone, other than Franklin Roosevelt.

Harvard was then the most austere, the most self-regarding and the most conservative of American universities and it had been shocked and shaken by the nearly four years of Roosevelt’s plunging New Deal, its headlong sponsorship of a welter of new laws designed, as he blithely put it, to punish the economic royalists and spread the resources of the national government to the lowest in the land, not least, the 13 million jobless who had been there when he went into the White House.

This breathless assault on the received wisdom of the Coolidge and Hoover years fell like a prolonged hurricane on the bankers and the captains of industry who had been the American colossi of those times. It wrenched them from their moorings, they had no other sheet anchor to cling to than their rooted belief in Adam Smith and the beautiful interplay of the laws of supply and demand.

Well there were quite a few economic royalists present on this Harvard occasion, and many more downright or genteel conservative families who felt they had been betrayed by this man. And so they had. He had campaigned with persuasive zest, just as Mr Reagan was to do 50 years later, to dismantle the bureaucracies of the central government, and return its accumulating powers to the sovereign states.

But once he was in, this patrician Hudson Valley squire, so dependably – to the eastern establishment – "one of us", suddenly looked beyond Washington and the east coast, and the social landscape he had inhabited and adorned, he lifted his eyes to the bankrupt farmers and small businessmen of the midwest, and the breadlines outside the smokeless steel mills and the locked automobile factories, and to the scurvy-ridden tenant farmers of the deep south, and the forlorn stevedores of the Pacific coast, and the one family in three or four everywhere that had nothing coming in, and he changed his mind.

He decided, overnight, that the 48 states had neither, separately, the money nor the equal powers to bail out their people. He performed the most breathtaking U-turn in American history. He asked the Congress for emergency power, as great as the power that would be given him, if we were, in fact, invaded by a foreign foe. A Congress, as fearful as anybody over the Depression and what it boded, gave it to him.

Roosevelt set up an administration which for a year or two actually appropriated the law-making powers of Congress. Having promised to weaken the powers and the patronage of the central government, he seized power at the centre, created a whole alphabet of new bureaus, improvised, you might say, a new sort of national government which planned economic and social welfare on a national scale, just as the great corporations had done for their industries.

What irked them more than anything was his brazen transfer of credit from the bankers to the government. He, after all, can print money as well as borrow it and he didn’t care what the national debt ran to. He had been seduced, the betrayed men moaned, by the theory of deficit financing, and its English advocate John Maynard Keynes.

To be truthful, he met Keynes once, when the great economist called at the White House to pay his respects. When Keynes left, Roosevelt called in his Secretary of Labour. "How did it go?", he was asked. "I haven’t the remotest idea what his theory is all about," Roosevelt replied. "He talked nothing but mathematics."

Roosevelt didn’t need a seducer or a teacher, he didn’t read much except books on naval history. He trusted to the pricking of his thumbs, he got in the White House and acted on instinct. We should have known then that we were in for a... boisterous presidency. While he was in it, he had many visions, some splendid some barmy; farms electrified from coast to coast by the harnessed power of the great rivers, of a country off the gold standard and on the silver standard, of a Supreme Court, tamed once and for all to do his bidding.

But his first vision was the one he made real, the one he institutionalised, the one he will always be remembered by, and the one that 50 years ago established a national consensus, about the duties of the national government; that is not going to be changed.

All this was known and felt bitterly felt by the crowd of Harvard families that awaited him on that stormy autumn day in 1936. I had been given my first American press card, and to watch him arrive I snuck into a side street, not much wider than alley, that led him to Harvard Yard. I had never seen the president in the flesh, I had a mental picture of him which could not quite bring into focus the bounding newsreel image of him, and what I knew of his personal history – the petted mother's boy, the Harvard dude, now scholar, the ambling social practitioner of the law, the correct marriage to an ugly duckling cousin. Intimidated at all times, by a mother-in-law, who had bought their house, broken through the walls of it to allow an easier passage to her adjoining house, the better to keep her matriarchal eye on what the bride was doing to her adored Franklin. And then there had been an illness and a lucky governorship and, puzzlingly, the violent emergence of this dude, into a burly, fearless, resounding president, like those organisms that the evolutionists say develop minutely for eons and, inexplicably, take a sudden leap forward in their growth.

The president's car swept into the side street, a secret service man dashed at me, told me I had no business being there, but I had better stay pinned against the wall, till they’d got the president on his way. Three men leaned into the car, and they lifted him out, like a sack of potatoes, put him down tenderly, gave him two walking sticks and two helping arms, they stuck his hat on his head, and he straightened up and hobbled off, up a ramp, towards the dais. Everywhere he went there had to be ramps and runways.

Now I had known this in my head, but now, I turned cold with a sort of alarmed admiration. Of course, he was paralysed, had been for 16 years, the legs were withered, only the upper body and the heart had doubly strengthened. The applause that day came from the foreigners. The Harvard crowd stood sullen, clapping wanly their disapproval. It was not one of Harvard’s finest hours.

And yet it was from them, or from one who shared their detestation of him that, when all the tributes are written, the best lines have come. Westbrook Pegler, a sworn enemy of Roosevelt, a brilliant writer and an irascible man, wrote down, in that same year, and wrote this, "As a social and political liver shaker he has had no equal in our time in this country. Ordinary, tricky, wayward and strong as a bull, he looked nice and dressy back there in 1932.

"There was nothing in his past record to indicate what a cantankerous hide, he would turn out to be... yet, never in our time, have people been so conscious of the meanness which a complacent upper class will practice on the help and of the government's duty to do something real and personal for the assistance of those who are so far down that they can’t help themselves.

"If the country doesn’t go absolutely broke in his time, it will be a more intelligent and a better country after him."

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