FDR - Jean Edward Smith [197]
As soon as FDR signed the Emergency Banking Act, he moved to consolidate his conservative support. Just as he did after winning the nomination in Chicago, Roosevelt turned right before he turned left. Within the hour he summoned congressional leaders back to the White House to inform them he wanted authority to reduce government spending across the board.* Roosevelt sought to put the government’s house in order: to balance the federal budget before undertaking emergency relief. The two biggest culprits, in FDR’s eyes, were government salaries and bloated veterans’ benefits. He told the legislators he wanted to cut all government workers’ salaries by at least 15 percent to bring them into line with the reduced cost of living since 1928 and scale back the elaborate array of entitlements enacted for veterans since World War I—currently consuming roughly one quarter of the federal budget.29 Under Roosevelt’s proposal, for example, congressional pay would be reduced from $10,000 to $8,500 and his own salary would fall from $90,000 to $75,000. Shortly after midnight the leaders departed—some stunned, some enthusiastic, and a few, such as the populist John Rankin of Mississippi and progressive Robert La Follette, very angry at what the president proposed.
Roosevelt was undeterred. The following day, Friday, March 10, he sent a special message to Congress: “For three long years the Federal Government has been on the road to bankruptcy.” The growing deficit, he said, had increased economic stagnation, multiplied the unemployed, and contributed to the banking collapse. National recovery required the government’s credit to rest on a solid foundation, and that required that the budget be balanced. Roosevelt asked for broad authority to effect the economies he deemed necessary. “If the Congress chooses to vest me with this responsibility it will be exercised in a spirit of justice to all, of sympathy to those who are in need and of maintaining inviolate the basic welfare of the United States.”30 Attached to the message was “A Bill to Maintain the Credit of the United States” drafted by the Bureau of the Budget.31
Congress was incredulous, and for a moment the president’s control hung in the balance. Although conservatives such as Carter Glass and Mississippi’s Pat Harrison offered unstinting praise, liberal Democrats felt betrayed. The last thing the country needed at this time was more deflation, and FDR’s proposal was surely deflationary. In the House, Majority Leader Byrns refused to introduce the bill. When Speaker Rainey assembled the Democratic caucus Saturday morning, he failed to get the necessary two-thirds vote that would have bound the party to support the president. That afternoon the bill was introduced on the floor by Representative John McDuffie of Alabama, a skilled parliamentarian and rock-hard conservative who had been narrowly defeated for the speakership.32 After two hours of fierce debate, the bill passed 266–138. Ninety-two Democrats and five Farmer-Labor members voted against, but 69 Republicans led by the ultraconservative John Taber of New York crossed the aisle to support the president.* At the same time the House was acting, the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Pat Harrison, reported the bill favorably, setting the stage for action by the full Senate on Monday. “I am for giving the President whatever he wants in the way of power,” said Senator Arthur Capper, a Kansas Republican. “This is an emergency situation.”33
Sunday evening, at the conclusion of his first week in the White House, FDR gave his