FDR - Jean Edward Smith [262]
* In 1950 Pepper was defeated for reelection by Congressman George Smathers, who informed Florida voters that Pepper’s actress sister was “a practicing thespian living in New York’s Greenwich Village.”
* “You will remember,” FDR told his radio audience, “that it was the Copperheads who … tried their best to make Lincoln and his Congress give up the fight, let the nation remain split in two and return to peace—peace at any price.” 7 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 395, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1941).
* Alva Adams of Colorado; Pat McCarran of Nevada; Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri; and Augustine Lonergan of Connecticut. Clark had voted against the administration 42 percent of the time, Adams 36 percent, McCarran 35 percent, and Lonergan 21 percent. James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal 348–349 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967).
* O’Connor, ironically, was the brother of FDR’s former law partner and confidant Basil O’Connor. In 1923 he succeeded to the House seat (the so-called silk-stocking district on the Upper East Side) formerly held by the legendary Bourke Cochran. After losing the Democratic primary in 1938, he contested the seat as a Republican (New York’s cross-filing provision permitted that) and in November was narrowly defeated for a second time.
NINETEEN
ON THE BRINK
What America does or fails to do in the next few years has a far greater bearing and influence on the history of the whole human race for centuries to come than most of us who are here today can ever conceive.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, DECEMBER 5, 1938
REPUBLICAN VICTORIES IN 1938 did not represent a return to Hooverism or a repudiation of the achievements of the New Deal. As the country had changed, so had the GOP. New leaders like Thomas Dewey in New York, Harold Stassen in Minnesota, even Robert Taft in Ohio did not advocate turning the clock back. It was time to digest and assimilate: a period of thermidor after six years of upheaval. “We have now passed the period of internal conflict in the launching of our program of social reform,” Roosevelt told Congress in his annual message on January 4, 1939. “Our full energies may now be released to invigorate the process of recovery in order to preserve our reforms.”1
FDR had sought to refashion the Democratic party into a permanent progressive force. But the resistance proved overwhelming. Southern Democracy remained the ball and chain that hobbled the party’s move to the left.2 The purge failed. And in the curious way of American politics, it would be those same disaffected Southern Democrats who would provide the president bedrock support to resist aggression and prepare the nation for war.
Until 1939 Roosevelt’s involvement in foreign affairs had been sporadic. In 1936, when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, the president was running for reelection. When Japan invaded China in 1937, FDR was consumed by the Court-packing fight. When Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, it was the “Roosevelt recession” on the front burner. The Czech crisis in September played out against the backdrop of the purge. And during the Spanish Civil War—which commenced in 1936 and would ultimately cost the lives of 650,000 combatants—the United States stood on the sidelines.3
Roosevelt’s approach to foreign policy was similar to his conduct of domestic affairs: intuitive, idiosyncratic, and highly personalized. Just as he divided the New Deal’s relief effort between Ickes and Hopkins, he split diplomacy between Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles. As secretary of state, Hull had titular responsibility. As undersecretary, Welles exercised operational control. Like Ickes and Hopkins, they competed for FDR’s attention. Unlike Ickes and Hopkins, they shared an abiding dislike. In the War Department Roosevelt presided over a similar rivalry.