FDR - Jean Edward Smith [165]
Raymond Moley was a Columbia political science professor who specialized in criminal justice. FDR had appointed him to the Governor’s Commission on the Administration of Justice, and from time to time Moley had drafted policy statements for Roosevelt on judicial reform. In that capacity he had worked with Rosenman, and it was natural that Rosenman should have suggested him. Among academics, Moley was an organizer and manager, not a scholar, and he became, in Arthur Schlesinger’s words, a “ringmaster of the experts,” a middleman for their ideas.62 When approached by Rosenman, Moley not only accepted but recommended a number of his colleagues who might be willing to contribute. Two who made the cut were Rexford G. Tugwell and Adolf A. Berle.* Tugwell’s specialty was agriculture, and he was highly regarded as an articulate, original thinker who liked to shock his audience and often succeeded. Berle had been a child prodigy, graduating from Harvard Law School at twenty-one. He was now thirty-seven and a star at Columbia’s law school, where he was the resident expert on corporate finance.63 Joining the group were FDR’s law partner Basil “Doc” O’Connor and Rosenman. Roosevelt called the group his privy council. James Kieran, writing in The New York Times, referred to it as “FDR’s brains trust.”64 That name, shortened to “brain trust,” stuck. Roosevelt did not use the brain trust, or privy council, to provide him with new ideas. He engaged its members to flesh out, articulate, and refine the position he had come to embrace: a readiness to use the power of government to redress the economic ills from which the nation suffered.65
The first product of the brain trust was Roosevelt’s “forgotten man” speech of April 7, 1932. Roosevelt was scheduled to speak for ten minutes coast to coast on NBC’s Lucky Strike Hour, sponsored by the American Tobacco Company. He told Moley he wanted something that would address the economic problems confronting the nation. Written jointly by FDR, Moley, and Rosenman at the executive mansion, the speech was a shot across the bow of the nation’s economic conservatives.66 Roosevelt excoriated the Hoover administration for attacking the symptoms of the Depression, not the cause. “It has sought temporary relief from the top down rather than permanent relief from the bottom up. These unhappy times call for the building of plans that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”67
The following week Roosevelt carried the message to the Democratic party’s Jefferson Day dinner in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The economic problem was national in scope, said FDR, and required “imaginative and purposeful planning.”68 Roosevelt’s final speech before the convention was delivered at Oglethorpe University in Georgia on May 22, 1932.* “Must the country remain hungry and jobless while raw materials stand unused and factories idle?” he asked. “The country needs, the country demands, bold, persistent experimentation. Take a method and try it. If it fails admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”69
When the convention met on June 27, Roosevelt was still about 100 votes short of the 770 needed for the nomination. Except for the Yankee Kingdom (Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont), he had lost the Northeast to Smith; the delegations from New York and Pennsylvania were split; and in Virginia, Harry F. Byrd, anticipating that lightning might strike, had emerged as a favorite son. In the heartland, Ohio’s 52 votes were locked in behind its governor, George White—presumably a stand-in for Newton D. Baker; Illinois, with 58 votes, was backing its favorite son, Senator J. Hamilton Lewis; and Indiana’s delegation (30 votes) was uncommitted. The biggest obstacle—also the biggest surprise—lay in the West, where Texas and California (a total of 90 votes) were bound to House Speaker John Nance Garner.* Add Ritchie in Maryland and Murray in Oklahoma, and the recipe for a deadlocked convention seemed at hand. The key, as Roosevelt