Background of news –
President, party and Congress
By Bertram Benedict, editorial research reports
Gen. Washington, Woodrow Wilson has pointed out:
…set an example which few of his successors seem to have followed… he made constant and intimate use of his colleagues in every matter that he handled, seeking their assistance and advice by letter when they were at a distance.
The record shows that President Roosevelt, even in the pre-war years of his administration, consulted very sparingly with his party leaders.
The “soak-the-wealth” administration tax program of 1935 was sprung without warning upon a Congress which had been led to believe that the President desired no new general revenue bill in that year. The undistributed-profits tax program was placed before Congress in 1936 without Congressional leaders having been consulted, and in the following year, revision of the tax was demanded by Chairman Harrison of the Senate Finance Committee.
Senator Robinson, then Senate Majority Leader, complained that he had not been consulted on the President’s Supreme Court plan of 1937, and Chairman Farley of the Democratic National Committee was not a party to the President’s purge attempt of 1938.
‘Intrusion’ resented
Party leaders complain that at the same time President Roosevelt has intruded into what should be their private province. His “Dear Alben” letter to Senator Barkley in 1937 was supposed to have shown presidential preference for Mr. Barkley over Mr. Harrison for the post of Senate Majority Leader, and in 1940, the President forced the nomination of Henry A. Wallace for Vice President.
Party leaders have also complained that when they have wrung concessions from the President, he does not stay put. In November 1941, the House, bitter at strikes in defense plants, passed by a narrow margin the administration-supported revision of the Neutrality Act only after Speaker Rayburn had read aloud a letter from the President interpreted as promising immediate action against such strikes. The House leaders felt the promise was not kept.
The record also shows that even at the beginning of the New Deal, an overwhelmingly-Democratic Congress refused to follow the new President in all issues, though the President sent Congress in 1933 a letter thanking it for “a more sincere and more wholehearted cooperation” than had existed between the executive and the legislative branches for many years.
Congress in 1933 toned down the administration’s draft of the NRA Act, forced concessions in the administration’s original economy program, and rejected several presidential appointments. In 1934, Congress overrode a presidential veto in order to restore cuts made in government salaries and veterans’ payments.
Wilson’s method recalled
Older members of Congress recall nostalgically that Woodrow Wilson put through his program in his first term largely by working hand-in-glove with the party leaders and caucuses. Yet in 1916, when the party leaders rejected Wilson’s defense program, he went over their heads by appealing to the public in a speaking tour.
Wilson also called upon Democratic voters to purge, in the party primaries, certain outstanding Democratic members of Congress who had been anti-administration.
Most strong Democratic Presidents have had party revolts on their hands in Congress.
In Cleveland’s second term, Democratic leaders in Congress joined with the Republican minority to emasculate the administration’s low-tariff bill. In terms not unlike Roosevelt’s attack on the tax bill of 1944, Cleveland denounced the bill as “party perfidy and party dishonor” and an “abandonment of Democratic principle.” In terms not unlike Barkley’s attack upon Roosevelt in 1944, Senator Gorman of Maryland, leader of the Democrats in the Senate, thereupon delivered on the floor of the Senate a bitter personal attack on the President.
