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By Root 1910 0

a late-night call to Farley telling him to telephone Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago to instruct Illinois senator William Dieterich to vote for Barkley. When Farley refused, Roosevelt got Hopkins to make the call, and Dieterich, who was pledged to Harrison, switched sides. The White House also asked Kansas City’s Tom Pendergast to pressure freshman senator Harry Truman, and Pendergast dutifully made the call: “No, Tom,” said Truman, “I can’t.… I’ve made up my mind to vote for Pat Harrison and I’m going to do it.”4 A third waverer was Harrison’s fellow Mississippian, Theodore G. Bilbo. The Mississippi Democratic party was really two parties, one patrician, the other redneck, and Harrison and Bilbo represented opposing factions. The common denominator was white supremacy: both hated the party of Lincoln more than each other. Bilbo said he would vote for Harrison if Harrison would ask him. “Tell the son of a bitch I wouldn’t speak to him if it meant the Presidency of the United States,” said Harrison.5 Bilbo voted for Barkley. When the ballots were counted, Barkley beat Harrison by one vote, 38–37.

White House pressure had prevailed. But it was an empty victory. Roosevelt’s intervention reinforced the image of the president as deceitful and untrustworthy. Many on Capitol Hill resented FDR’s meddling in what was seen as a purely congressional matter—another example of executive overreach. “It is an encroachment on the prerogatives of the members of the legislative branch no President ought to engage in,” said Garner.6 Tactically, the move hurt Roosevelt. If he had remained neutral, most senators believed, Harrison would have won easily and FDR could have persuaded him, as he had Joe Robinson, to support most New Deal measures out of party loyalty.7 With Harrison now estranged from the administration, his position as chairman of the Finance Committee provided a powerful vantage point from which to derail or delay White House legislation. Barkley, for his part, would henceforth be known to Washington as “Dear Alben,” a creature of the president.

In the House, the situation was little better. Members, some of whom had come to Washington when the city’s streetcars were pulled by horses, resented the high-handedness of New Deal appointees as well as their intellectual arrogance. “Unless one can murder the broad ‘a’ and present a Harvard sheepskin he is definitely out,” grumbled Michigan congressman John Dingell.8 When Hatton Sumners, speaking to a crowded chamber, called on House Democrats to establish a new party leadership—implicitly reading Roosevelt out of the party—no one rose in the president’s defense. Not Sam Rayburn, who listened mutely to his fellow Texan’s rant; not Speaker Bankhead, who sat sphinxlike on the dais; not even Maury Maverick, the unofficial cheerleader for New Dealers in the House. “Nothing quite like it had occurred in that body for a long time,” observed The New Republic.9

Roosevelt was equally unforgiving. “The Supreme Court fight lived on in the President’s memory,” said Farley. “His attitude was that he had been double-crossed and let down by men who should have rallied loyally to his support. For weeks and months afterward I found him fuming against the members of his own party. Outwardly he was as gay and debonair as ever; inwardly he was seething.”10*

FDR twitted Congress. He relished inviting members to the White House, cryptically suggesting that those who crossed him should be on guard. “I’ve got them on the run,” he told Farley. “They have no idea what’s going to happen and are beginning to worry. They’ll be sorry yet.”11

Amid mutual recriminations between the White House and Capitol Hill, the country, as John Garner would have said, was going to hell in a handbasket. A rash of sit-down strikes in the spring and summer of 1937 polarized the political scene further. To some extent the strikes were the natural outgrowth of the Wagner Labor Relations Act, which afforded workers the right to join a union. Labor zeroed in on steel and auto production—the “Hindenburg Line” of American industry,