FDR - Jean Edward Smith [219]
Lieutenant Colonel John C. H. Lee, detailed by the Army to study the CWA, watched with astonishment as Hopkins put people to work in every county and every town in the country in less than two months. In World War I it had taken the Army a year and a half to muster as many men, said Lee, and, unlike the Army, Hopkins paid his people weekly. Lee, whose personal style ran heavily along authoritarian lines,* expressed unaccustomed admiration for Hopkins’s informality with his youthful staff. “These assistants address Mr. Hopkins fondly as ‘Harry.’ There is no rigidity or formality, yet he holds their respect, confidence and whole-souled cooperation.”52
The second session of the Seventy-third Congress convened on January 3, 1934. FDR was still the quarterback calling plays, but the opposition had begun to coalesce. Republicans were recovering from their postelection shell shock, and in the Democratic party both the far left and the extreme right were in incipient revolt. Roosevelt held the high ground, and at his recommendation Congress enacted legislation establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the investment industry and the Federal Communications Commission to control the airwaves.53 But the majorities behind the bills were smaller, and in the case of the SEC, passage required the president’s personal intervention.† Congress also enacted the Railroad Retirement Act to provide mandatory pension coverage in the rail industry and agreed to fix the price of gold at $35 an ounce.54 After allowing the dollar to float for a year, Roosevelt decided to devalue it permanently at 59 percent of its previous worth.55 When the Seventy-third Congress adjourned sine die on June 18, FDR wrote Speaker Rainey, “It’s been a grand session—the best in all our history.”56
Two weeks later, Roosevelt went to the people. In his first fireside chat of 1934, FDR asked Americans to judge the progress of recovery for themselves. “Are you better off today than you were last year? Are your debts less burdensome? Is your bank account more secure?” Roosevelt mocked “the Doubting Thomases” who decried the loss of liberty. “Answer this question also out of the facts of your own life. Have you lost any of your rights or liberty or constitutional freedom of action and choice?” It was a powerful performance—as powerful as any speech Roosevelt had given.57
On July 1, 1934, the president boarded the USS Houston, a sister ship of the Indianapolis, for a 14,000-mile trip to the Hawaiian Islands via the Panama Canal—his favorite form of relaxation. The second session of the Seventy-third Congress had not been the bed of roses FDR’s letter to Rainey suggested. Roosevelt’s rivals for control of the party did not take their exclusion lightly. “It is difficult today,” wrote the conservative pundit Frank Kent, “to name any outstanding Democratic leader of the pre–New Deal period who is in sympathy with the Roosevelt policy.”58 Passage of the Securities Exchange Act confirmed the schism. Al Smith, John W. Davis, Newton D. Baker, and the remnants of the Raskob-Shouse organization joined ranks in an attempt to return the party to its pre-Roosevelt, probusiness moorings. “Who is Ickes?” asked Al Smith rhetorically. “Who is Hopkins? And in the name of all that’s holy, who is Tugwell? Is La Guardia a Democrat?* If he is, then I am a Chinaman with a haircut.”59
In August 1934, with generous financial backing from the du Ponts, General Motors, Sun Oil, and Montgomery Ward, the dissidents formed the American Liberty League, with Jouett Shouse as president. The League’s avowed objectives were to teach respect for the rights of property and require government to encourage private enterprise. Asked