Read Online Roosevelt by James MacGregor Burns - Free Book Online Page B

social-welfare groups; Harold Ickes, for the old Bull Moose, clean-government, conservation elements; Attorney General Robert Jackson, for the urban, partisan, liberal Democratic party; Claude Wickard, for the new agriculture subsidized by theNew Deal. The new Postmaster General, Frank Walker, who had taken Jim Farley’s place after Farley quit on the third-term issue, carried on the old urban-immigrant-Catholic traditions of the party. Vice President Henry Wallace, a baffling combination of agrarian, progressive, administrative politician, scientific agriculturalist, and philosophical mystic, had emerged from the progressive wing of Midwestern agriculture and still spoke for it, but he was a man of parts, as liberal in domestic policy as Ickes or Perkins, as internationalist as Hull or Stimson. Indeed, all the Cabinet members were far more than brokers of group interests. Most by now were veteran administrators and hardy survivors of bureaucratic infighting. In their experience, drive, political skills, breadth of outlook, and sheer diversity they made up by 1941 one of the ablest Cabinets in American history—though Roosevelt dealt with them far more as individuals than as a collective organism.
    The President’s three-party coalition also embraced key enclaves of Capitol Hill. The President’s men—Speaker Sam Rayburn, of Texas, and Majority Leader John W. McCormack, of Massachusetts, in the House, and Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley, of Kentucky, and James F. Byrnes, of South Carolina—were party, and partisan, leaders in the two houses. Southerners chaired most of the important committees in both chambers; the Deep South bloc, though occasionally divided, formed the most cohesive of the party voting blocs on Capitol Hill, especially on foreign policy. This bloc, allied with conservative, mainly rural Republicans, had harassed the New Deal, but as the axis of national priority shifted from domestic to foreign policy, the Southern bloc was becoming a legislative bastion for the White House. Senator Walter George of Georgia symbolized the shift. The prime target—and survivor—of Roosevelt’s unsuccessful purge of conservative Southerners, George was now supporting Roosevelt’s interventionist policies from his high post on the Foreign Relations Committee. The Southerners, in any event, did not wholly monopolize the committee chairmanships. Urban Democrats, slowly building seniority after the cities had begun to go heavily Democratic twenty years before, were now crowding toward the top. Robert F. Wagner, of New York, presided over the Senate Banking and Currency Committee; David I. Walsh, of Massachusetts—no friend of the President—over Naval Affairs; and, in the House, Sol Bloom, of uptown Manhattan, over the Foreign Affairs Committee; Mary T. Norton, of New Jersey, over Labor; and Adolph J. Sabath, of Chicago, over the Southern-dominated Rules Committee.
    Formidable though it was, this three-party coalition of Franklin Roosevelt’s depended in the end on the votes and voices of thepeople. And as the nation turned to its great decisions of 1941, the President was taking his soundings of popular attitudes through his visitors, public-opinion polls, White House mail, fellow politicians, press opinion—and through his own extrasensory political perceptions.
    Public opinion hunched strongly toward greater aid to Britain. Poll after poll in the early weeks of 1941 showed that by roughly two-to-one margins people supported not only the Lend-Lease bill but also controversial specifics, such as use by British warships of American ports to repair, refuel, and refit; and the lending of war-planes and any other war supplies belonging to the United States services if the President judged that such aid would help the defense of the United States. A strong majority would help England win even at the risk of getting into war. Such opinions had a markedly geographical cast. Polls showed isolationist feeling to be