Read Online Roosevelt by James MacGregor Burns - Free Book Online
Authors: James MacGregor Burns
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largely through the executive and the other through the legislature—fought with each other over domestic policy, but they tended to agree on a low-tariff, pro-British, generally interventionist foreign policy. In 1938 Roosevelt had battled month after month with Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and other Southern conservatives—even to the point of trying to purge Southern obstructionists from their congressional seats—and had mainly failed. But as the decade waned, Roosevelt Democrats reunited with their Southern brethren against the isolationist forces.
By early 1941 Roosevelt was losing no opportunity to butter up old Carter Glass, whom he had fought in the late thirties for control of Virginia patronage. He wrote to him that the Nazis had described Glass, the President, and President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University, as Jewish Freemasons. “I can understand it in your case and mine on account of our noses but I do not quite see where Nicholas Miraculous Butler comes in.”
The Republicans were as divided as the Democrats. After eight years out of power, the national organization had fallen partly into the hands of such congressional nabobs as Senators Charles McNary of Oregon, Robert A. Taft of Ohio, already a rising young fogy, Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, and others, mainly Mid-westerners, in the Senate; and of such as Joseph W. Martin of Massachusetts and John Taber of New York in the House. Cautious toward innovations, prudent in public finance, tending toward isolationism in foreign policy, the Republican congressional leadership had allied with its ideological counterparts in the Southern Democracy to hamstring the New Deal during Roosevelt’s second term. Symbolic of this party to the President, but actually in the party’s right wing, was his own Congressman, Hamilton Fish, fellow Harvard man, fellow mid-Hudson politician, and ex-football great. Roosevelt had barred him from the White House because, he told friends, he had made a knowingly false attack on the President’s mother years before.
Flanking the congressional Republicans was the presidential Republican party, more liberal in economic and social policy, far more international-minded, rooted more in the urban areas of the Northeast, and imbued with memories of its great days in the past. This party, led in past years by a string of New Yorkers including Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, had beenheadless and disorganized in the 1930’s. Then in 1940 it suddenly found a dramatic champion in Wendell Willkie, of Indiana and New York. For four months the Taft-Martin Republicans papered over their differences with the presidential party in a frantic effort to overcome the “third-term candidate”; then, with Willkie beaten, the election coalition began to break up again.
The plight of the Republican presidential party was due in part to Roosevelt’s skill at not challenging but infiltrating it. At just what point he decided to win over some of the presidential Republican leadership is still hard to say. Perhaps he was tempted by immediate advantages and only later saw the strategic possibilities, for he had always stepped easily back and forth between his roles as party leader and as bipartisan chief of state. When war broke out in Europe in September 1939 he had sought to achieve a political coup by bringing into his Cabinet the 1936 Republican ticket of Alf Landon and Frank Knox. Landon declined, fearing that he might become a cat’s-paw for Roosevelt’s third-term ambitions. Roosevelt let the matter lie until the spring of 1940, when Felix Frankfurter and others urged him to draft Stimson. Reassured that Stimson, at seventy-two, was still keen and resilient, the President telephoned him on a day in June 1940 just after Stimson, over the radio, called for repeal of the Neutrality Act, compulsory military service, and stepped-up aid to Britain and France even if it required Navy convoys.
In drafting
By early 1941 Roosevelt was losing no opportunity to butter up old Carter Glass, whom he had fought in the late thirties for control of Virginia patronage. He wrote to him that the Nazis had described Glass, the President, and President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University, as Jewish Freemasons. “I can understand it in your case and mine on account of our noses but I do not quite see where Nicholas Miraculous Butler comes in.”
The Republicans were as divided as the Democrats. After eight years out of power, the national organization had fallen partly into the hands of such congressional nabobs as Senators Charles McNary of Oregon, Robert A. Taft of Ohio, already a rising young fogy, Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, and others, mainly Mid-westerners, in the Senate; and of such as Joseph W. Martin of Massachusetts and John Taber of New York in the House. Cautious toward innovations, prudent in public finance, tending toward isolationism in foreign policy, the Republican congressional leadership had allied with its ideological counterparts in the Southern Democracy to hamstring the New Deal during Roosevelt’s second term. Symbolic of this party to the President, but actually in the party’s right wing, was his own Congressman, Hamilton Fish, fellow Harvard man, fellow mid-Hudson politician, and ex-football great. Roosevelt had barred him from the White House because, he told friends, he had made a knowingly false attack on the President’s mother years before.
Flanking the congressional Republicans was the presidential Republican party, more liberal in economic and social policy, far more international-minded, rooted more in the urban areas of the Northeast, and imbued with memories of its great days in the past. This party, led in past years by a string of New Yorkers including Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, had beenheadless and disorganized in the 1930’s. Then in 1940 it suddenly found a dramatic champion in Wendell Willkie, of Indiana and New York. For four months the Taft-Martin Republicans papered over their differences with the presidential party in a frantic effort to overcome the “third-term candidate”; then, with Willkie beaten, the election coalition began to break up again.
The plight of the Republican presidential party was due in part to Roosevelt’s skill at not challenging but infiltrating it. At just what point he decided to win over some of the presidential Republican leadership is still hard to say. Perhaps he was tempted by immediate advantages and only later saw the strategic possibilities, for he had always stepped easily back and forth between his roles as party leader and as bipartisan chief of state. When war broke out in Europe in September 1939 he had sought to achieve a political coup by bringing into his Cabinet the 1936 Republican ticket of Alf Landon and Frank Knox. Landon declined, fearing that he might become a cat’s-paw for Roosevelt’s third-term ambitions. Roosevelt let the matter lie until the spring of 1940, when Felix Frankfurter and others urged him to draft Stimson. Reassured that Stimson, at seventy-two, was still keen and resilient, the President telephoned him on a day in June 1940 just after Stimson, over the radio, called for repeal of the Neutrality Act, compulsory military service, and stepped-up aid to Britain and France even if it required Navy convoys.
In drafting
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