FDR - Jean Edward Smith [229]
On the political front, Roosevelt’s opponents were in disarray. With Huey Long’s assassination in September 1935 (Long was forty-two years old), the Share Our Wealth movement imploded. The Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, a rabble-rousing fundamentalist from Shreveport, had seized the reins and the mailing lists, but without the Kingfish the effort floundered. The remnants of Long’s political organization made peace with the administration—critics called it the Second Louisiana Purchase—and Smith was shunted into the rhetorical wilderness.7 Father Coughlin, for his part, appeared to be concentrating on congressional elections, and the Townsend forces had been undermined by passage of the Social Security Act. To the Democrats’ delight, Herbert Hoover had emerged from domestic exile, traveling widely around the country, seeking vindication for what he believed had been a singularly successful four years in the White House. Napoleon said that after the French Revolution the Bourbons had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The same might be said of Herbert Hoover. His message of retrenchment, the gold standard, and a balanced budget fell on deaf ears. Most Republican politicians shunned the former president’s embrace, certain it meant electoral defeat come November.
Roosevelt launched his campaign with a fighting State of the Union message on January 3. At Louis Howe’s urging, the president converted what is normally a request for legislation into an election keynote. “Let ’em have it,” said Howe. “They’ll lap it up.”8
Roosevelt spoke to Congress in a special evening session—the first president to do so—and to the delight of wildly cheering Democrats pulled every partisan plug. A vast radio audience heard FDR lambaste the “resplendent economic autocracy” that threatened to retard the nation’s recovery. “We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed,” said FDR with evident relish. Now these sinister forces were conspiring to recapture power. “Autocrats in small things, they seek autocracy in bigger things.… Give them their way and they will take the course of every aristocracy of the past—power for themselves, enslavement for the public.”9 It was the language of class war that Long might have used. Speaking to the party’s annual Jackson Day celebration several days later, FDR identified with Old Hickory, who like himself had
an overwhelming proportion of the material wealth of the Nation arrayed against him.
The great media … fought him. Haughty and sterile intellectualism opposed him. Musty reaction disapproved him. Hollow and outworn traditionalism shook a trembling finger at him. It seemed sometimes that all were against him—all but the people of the United States.… History so often repeats itself.10
On January 25, 1936, Roosevelt’s autocrats of privilege made their rebuttal. Two thousand guests decked out in formal evening attire gathered at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel for the Liberty League’s annual dinner. The New York Times reported that the audience “represented, either through principals or attorneys, a large portion of the capital wealth of the country.”11 John W. Davis and Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland were there, as were Newton D. Baker, Winthrop Aldrich, and assorted du Ponts, Mellons, and Vanderbilts. The keynote speech was given by Al Smith, in white tie and tails, who assailed the New Deal and FDR for more than an hour. Smith said that if Roosevelt was nominated, he planned to take a walk in November. “It is all right with me if they want to disguise themselves as Norman Thomas or Karl Marx or Lenin … but let me give one solemn warning: There can be only one capital, Washington or Moscow. There can be only one atmosphere of government, the clean, pure, fresh air of free America, or the foul breath of communistic Russia.”12
Smith’s audience went giddy with delight. “It was perfect,” crowed Pierre S. du Pont.13 But as a political effort, the night proved a disaster—“one of the major tactical