FDR - Jean Edward Smith [257]
Roosevelt’s frustration with the Seventy-fifth Congress led him to his third serious mistake. The Court-packing fiasco was the first; the premature cutback in federal spending the second; and his 1938 attempt to purge the Democratic party of dissident members of Congress was the third. Hard-core Republican opposition on Capitol Hill was taken for granted. What FDR could not forgive was the defection of conservative Democrats. The remedy he embarked upon was to oppose the renomination of key members of the House and Senate in upcoming Democratic primaries. It was a breathtaking departure from American tradition. No president since Andrew Johnson had intervened directly in individual congressional contests, and none since Wilson had made an off-year election a referendum on the presidency. Given the unhappy results in both instances, Roosevelt should have been forewarned.
FDR’s interest was piqued by the landslide victory in January of New Deal congressman Lister Hill, running for the Alabama Senate seat vacated by Hugo Black.* Hill ran as an out-and-out supporter of the president, much as Black had been. His primary opponent was former senator Tom Heflin, an unrepentant racist from the red clay hills of eastern Alabama who had once shot a black man on a Washington streetcar.76 Heflin had deserted the party over Al Smith’s Catholicism in 1928 and despite his populist, rabble-rousing past was backed by a significant portion of the state’s financial establishment. Hill beat Heflin 90,000 to 50,000—almost 2 to 1.77
Initially FDR pursued the purge by proxy. As primary season approached, the White House asked Farley to draft a statement defining the administration’s position. Farley prepared the customary disclaimer proclaiming the Democratic National Committee’s neutrality: “As individuals, the members of the National Committee may have their favorites, but as a body the organization’s hands are off. These nominations are entirely the affair of the States or the Congressional districts, and however these early battles may result, the National Committee will be behind the candidate that the people themselves choose. This goes for every state and every Congressional district.”78
Ten minutes after Farley’s draft statement arrived at the White House, James Roosevelt was on the phone. “Father has struck the last two sentences out,” he told Farley. The decision was made by the president on the spot. He was not lured into the purge by ideologue advisers; Hopkins’s thumbprints were not on it, nor had Corcoran hoodwinked FDR. The decision to intervene in the upcoming Democratic primaries was made by Roosevelt, and it was made in January 1938. “An albatross, not of my own shooting, was hung from my neck,” wrote Farley. “From that time on I knew no political peace.”79
First up was Florida, where pro–New Deal senator Claude Pepper faced an uphill primary fight against Congressman J. Mark Wilcox of West Palm Beach, an ultraconservative member of the Florida business establishment who made opposition to the wages and hours bill the centerpiece of his campaign. Wilcox was a marvel on the stump, and prognosticators gave Pepper little chance. In the colorful rhetoric of the Sunshine State, Wilcox titillated backcountry audiences with rumors that Pepper had been guilty of celibacy before marriage and addicted to monogamy ever since.80* On February 6, 1938, James held a press conference in Palm Beach, where he announced the White House’s support for Pepper in the primary. Thomas Corcoran, a Harvard Law School classmate of Pepper, funneled funds from